


Will Happen, Happening, Happened

by CSLong



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Chaos, Eventual Happy Ending, Hell, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Redeemed Ben Solo, Rey Palpatine (If I must), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 49,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21891244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CSLong/pseuds/CSLong
Summary: * Spoilers for TRos*But that's why we are here right?***Rey and Ben have been kept apart by Snoke, by war, by hate, and, now, by death. But the Prince and the Scavenger are done waiting. Ben will fight through hell to return to Rey, and Rey will scavenge for every bit of Ben Solo in the galaxy. Palpatine will not have the last word...not in the Skywalker story, not in any story.
Relationships: Kylo Ren & Rey, Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 159
Kudos: 267





	1. Defiance

When joy pushes so quickly into pain, the soul freezes- unable to move this way or that way because both are still so close, neither to be trusted.

So, she freezes, with the taste of his kiss still lingering on her lips, the weight of his body in her arms, and the weight of the future that she had imagined- no, not imagined- the future that she had seen, for both of them, the future she had seen in his face and in that smile. For a moment, it was real, no longer a vision but something she could touch and taste.

He had saved her, brought her back from the brink of darkness. It was like a dream now, one she couldn’t hold, wherever she had been while in that darkness. But she had felt him still, a voice tender and filled with the promise that no matter where she went, he would find her. He had crossed into darkness to find her.

It was real and then gone.

He was there and then he wasn’t.

She freezes, for a moment. She can feel it quivering in her heart, at the tips of her fingers, rage, darkness, anger, fear, resentment for the future that was so close and now gone. It coiled in her belly like a snake and she felt it crawling up her throat.

But this was not the evil in her blood- this was not the wickedness of a Sith Lord- this was her- Rey Nobody- of precarious belonging and loved all the same by the man who had be been in her arms not moments ago.

And the rage stops behind her teeth.

Because his body is gone too.

The rage stops in the palms of her hands, she catches it there, clenching her hands into fists. 

Because there is something that she feels deep inside, where she thinks there _should_ be a gaping hole of nothingness, the profound sense of absence, of having lost a part of herself that she will never be able to restore, there is something there still, holding on by the thinnest of threads.

Whatever has just transpired in this moment, this moment of sacrifice, of joy; whatever loss (and there was loss) had just taken place, it is not death.

Of that she is certain.

She does not linger. She does not cry.

There is no time.

Somewhere, somehow, she knows that Ben is alive.

She had learned how to wait, a skill that had served her well as a Scavenger. But she is done waiting now. She stands, quickly. She does not linger over the empty place where Ben’s body had fallen. There is no time. She had waited long enough. _They_ had waited long enough. She would not stop until the wound was healed. She would cross from this plane into the next to bring him back; if she must, she will cross the stars to find Ben Solo.

###

He is certain, for a moment that he is dead, consumed in darkness; alone. Kylo Ren was dead, and soon, it seemed, Ben Solo would follow. His body ravaged by Palpatine, sprawled, near lifeless, in a Sith Temple. He can hear it calling, the beyond, the peace and bliss of becoming one with the Force. He can feel it closing in around him, when, he catches it, like the head of a striking serpent. There is peace there, but no Rey. She…she is still fighting.

Then he hears the voice, the true voice of his grandfather, not Vader, not Palpatine, but Anakin, speaking to his soul, to Rey’s soul, their soul still shared.

_“Finish what I started. Rise.”_

He stands.

_“All I need is your love.”_

He feels her, and then he doesn’t. He climbs harder, faster, ignoring the pain of his broken body, and the space now hallowed in his chest where she once filled.

_“Please help me save her life. I can’t live without her.”_

His hand grasps the lip of the pit and he pulls himself out. His place is with her. He sees her, but he cannot sense her. He moves quicker. He cannot sense her. And he cannot breathe. He looks into her eyes, the eyes that level him in every way, but they do not blink, the hope that shined there only a few moments ago is gone.

And, for a moment, he is ready to die, content to lay in this Sith Temple with her. He will not leave her alone; ever again. He would hold her until they both turned to stone on the graves of the Sith. His place is with her, would always be with her. The Girl. The Scavenger. The Nobody. His place is with her, in this life or the next.

If she dies, then he dies.

_“Look deeper," a voice calls, from somewhere, words spoken long ago, to him or to someone else he cannot tell. "Look deeper. You will find another way.”_

The heart of a Solo. The blood of a Skywalker. A generation of love and heartbreak, power and sacrifice, all lived in him now. It would be strong enough to save her.

He is not prepared to fight it when death comes for him. He knows the price of something like this, and he would pay it again and again and again if he had too. His heart, his life, his very breath belonged to her in this moment, in every moment.

He is willing to go, with peace and purpose. But then she does something. She does something that takes him by surprise, because, he is certain that the future they had seen was nothing more than vapor now. He is certain but then she touches his face and his heart trembles with hope.

She calls him Ben, and it’s like it’s being said for the first time, baptized and resurrected into something new and innocent.

She kisses him and he didn’t know there was this much joy in all the galaxy. And he thinks how he will kiss her again, and again, and again. Then he remembers.

He does not regret it, not for a moment, because she is alive, and she calls him Ben. But he is no longer at peace because there is a future still to be seen, a future in which he can kiss her, a future in which there are planets bursting with green and life and friends; and children with hazel-eyes and too-big ears, a future in which there is a chance to heal what has been broken.

So as he passes he digs in his heels.

As his spirit moves to become one with the Force, he does not go willingly. He stops somewhere. 

He fights.

He claws.

He raises his fist.

He will defy everything, death, the Force, Kylo Ren; everything for just a chance at that future.

He is a Solo. He is a Skywalker. He is an Organa.

His defiance will shake the stars.


	2. Across the Infinite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey prepares for a new mission, as Ben journeys through all that could have been, both good and bad.

Her goodbye is short. She tells Finn and Poe that there is something she still needs to do. There is a small part of her that wishes she had more time to linger, to celebrate, and then to join the Resistance as they continue their campaign against the First Order. But she knows that this victory will only ring hollow for her, tinged with the taste of bitterness and loss.

Because victory is not yet complete. This is not how their story ends; this is not how the Skywalker story _should_ end.

She tells Finn that she has work still to do in the galaxy, that the Force is still wounded and bleeding. A truth that she does not yet know how to rectify. She is surprised that Finn smiles at her, knowingly. As if he feels it too. He does not fight her as he once would have, she wonders if he sees it in her eyes that something is not right.

“Take BB-8,” he says softly, clutching her hands in his.

“Poe will kill me if I steal his child.”

He looks at her for a moment, and then presses a soft kiss to her fingers, before releasing her. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s how I know you’ll come back.” He pauses and holds her gaze intently. “And I…I don’t want you to be alone out there.”

She smiles, the sincerest smile she has been able to manage since Ben disappeared in her arms. She doesn’t make a promise. She has no idea what may lay ahead, or how long it will take, so she makes no promise that she will not be able to keep. “I love you, Finn,” she says instead.

She hugs him tight, holds her friend who holds so much of her heart. She knows he will understand. She can feel it that he can understand.

She steals away to the Falcon before anyone else can stop her or ask her. BB rolls ahead of her, less a bundle of excited beeps and thrills. He moves with purpose, as though he senses what Rey must do. She is about to mount the ramp of the Falcon. She doesn’t know where she is going. She has the Jedi texts, hoping something within will lead her to where she needs to go, she will comb them for every clue, the way she picked every crumb off her plate as a child.

“Where are you going exactly?”

She turns to find Maz, hands on her hips, ancient and knowing.

“I don’t know…” she says. “I just, I can’t explain it but he’s not…he’s not gone yet, Maz, I know it.”

Maz scoffs and walks toward Rey, her glasses only magnifying her giant eye roll. “Of course he's not,” says Maz. “The hubris of the dark side is it dismisses the strength of those things it considers foolish or fragile.”

Rey turns fully to face Maz, clutching the pole of the ramp. “Maz can you help me?”

“I told you a long time ago there was someone who can still come back,” she says. “ _That_ work isn’t done yet.” Rey feels it for the first time, a spring of urgent hope. She drops to her knees so she can look Maz in the eyes. Maz reaches out and takes her hand in hers, pressing a slip of paper into her hand. “Take this. These are your first steps in bringing our boy home.”

###

When Ben wakes, he is blinded by light; a painful, head-splitting white light. He groans inwardly.

“No…no…no…” he mutters, squeezing his eyes closed. He tried so damn hard to stay, to stop his spirit from becoming one with the kriffing Force. He did not want to leave her. He clenches his fist and is surprised to find that he has fists, and, somehow the sensation of nails digging into his palm. Obviously, he’s never become one with the Force, but he doubted very much that one retained their hands and body when this happened.

“Don’t panic,” says a voice. This time the voice is clear, not muddled with the echoes of the others, not overcome with the sounds of a war exploding overhead, and this time it prods at him like a hot poker. “And don’t throw a tantrum, Solo.”

He opens one eye, slowly, as the white light pours into him, blazing and painful. “Can you turn that down,” he groans, before cracking the other eye open.

“I can’t do anything,” says the voice. Ben remains still, looking at the endless chasm of light above him, it seems to go on for eternity. “This place is yours, grandson.”

Ben scoffs. “Glad that you’re here at my death,” he says. “Very helpful. Truly.” He moves to sit up and finds, somehow that his body does not protest at the movement. He looks down at himself. He touches his ribs gingerly finding no pain there, pats his legs and stomach, feeling for the broken bleeding parts, but they are gone.

“I’m sorry, Ben.”

He turns, and, somehow, in this place, wherever this place is, Anakin stands before him, not as ghostly vapor, but as flesh and blood. He can see his mother in him, his uncle, himself, all gathered into this one man that had meant so much to him for all of the wrong reasons. He snarls and stands up.

“I’m sure you are,” he snaps. “Couldn’t take a moment to come out of your ghostly afterlife to say, “Hey bud, that’s actually _not_ my voice in your head. It’s actually the guy I failed to kill sooo…””

“I tried,” Anakin interrupts. “I tried. And you could feel it when I did, even as you looked at that mask, especially when you looked at that mask. There were so many moments that I almost reached you, but…”

“There was too much Vader in me,” he finishes with bitter frustration, looking around and taking in his surroundings for the first time, a long corridor, filled with doors, and the further he looked he saw the white fade to grey and then to darkness.

“No,” says Anakin. Anakin places his hand on Ben’s shoulder and Ben jerks away, continuing to stare down the corridor. “That wasn’t it, Ben. There is so much of me in you, so much of your uncle, and so so much of your mother. It was too much, all of it. And no one, none of us, protected you like we should have.”

Ben turns again, the stinging tears escape his eyes and fall, his jaw clenches so tight the sound of his teeth grating fills his ears. He wants to swing, to punch the face of the man he had wasted so much time calling out to. “But you were there at the end of it all, just in time to wake me up so I could save her.” He unclenches his fist slowly and turns. “I guess that’s all that matters.”

“No Ben,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s not all that matters. You matter too,” said Anakin. “It’s why you’re here.”

Ben steps forward, he seems to be standing on nothing other than the light that fills the room, there are no clear markings, no changes as it moves from ground, to wall, to floor, ceiling, just light and doors. He walks toward one.

“Where is _here_ ,” he asks, he turns and points aggressively at his grandfather. “And don’t say whatever I make of it, whatever I am, whatever I brought in, give me an actual answer, old man.”

Anakin smirks, and for the first time Ben sees a glimpse of the human he may have been, and he feels a pang of disappointment that he is too angry right now, too distracted, with no time, and he wishes things could have been different, that someone had told him the truth of the man in front of him, the story about the darkness and the light that everyone had been too afraid to speak.

How much would have been different had he learned the tragedy of Anakin as deeply as he had learned the legend of Luke?

“You sound like your father, Solo.” Ben raises an eyebrow and continues to stare the ghost down, waiting for an answer. “You’re in an in-between place,” he says looking around. “It is yours,” he says. “Your creation, born of your own powerful connection to the Force. It looks different to different people, exists and doesn’t exist at all points.” Ben feels the frustration swell inside of him, but Anakin continues. “The Force connects all things,” he said. “All things future and all things past, all things that have been, are and will be, and they are gathered here, and because of that, in some way, they are always happening.”

Ben turns again and looks at the doors. “These are mine,” he says.

Anakin nods, a look of bittersweet regret in his eyes. “They are,” he answers. “Yours and hers.”

Hers.

Ben slowly reaches out and pushes on the first door and is swept away.

###

_He sees her, running toward him, a smile as bright as the sun. Something is missing- she isn’t the girl from Jakku, burdened with loneliness and intense desire to belong. She knows she belongs. She is wearing clothes that are familiar to him, the muted, grey and brown robes of the Jedi Temple._

_“Ben!”_

_Her voice is joyous, brimming with excitement. He turns toward her. She is not looking at him, but past him. He feels sick with regret and with longing when he turns to follow her gaze. It’s him, except it isn’t. He doesn't recognize the young man. He is younger, yes, but it’s more than that, so much more. He is open and light in a way that he had never once been in his life. He looks like his father as he steps out of the shuttle, Luke behind him. They are both dirty, their clothes torn, and Ben’s arm is wrapped in something that is stained with blood, but they are alive and happy._

_Rey runs toward Ben and throws her arms around his neck. Young Ben let out an exaggerated ‘Ooof’ but indulges her, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her tight._

_“Careful, kid. I’m wounded.”_

_“And I’m fine by the way,” says Luke stepping around the two of them. “No need to worry.”_

_“He's fine,” says Ben, rolling his eyes. “He decided my training would best be complete by him sitting through half the battle with the Knights of Ren.”_

_“Well,” says Luke, looking over his shoulder. “You did it. Though I object greatly to your decision to sneak a blaster into battle.”_

_Rey stepped away from young Ben, a fake scold in her stance. “Now Ben,” she says, lecturing. “A blaster is a crude weapon, your saber is for a more civilized age.”_

_“Yeah…yeah…” said Ben, continuing to dismount the ramp of the shuttle. “Nothing more civilized than running someone through with a laser sword.”_

_Rey laughs and turns to walk with him._

_Ben cannot tell what they mean to each other, as they walk back to the temple, Rey attentively looking over his wounds and giving instructions for aftercare. But Rey looks at him as though he hung the suns in the sky, and young Ben looks at her as though, even in a Jedi temple filled with the secrets of old and the strongest in the Force, there is nothing he would rather look at than her._

_Ben thinks for a moment he could stay here forever, content to watch what could have been had things not been so broken, but then he feels the pull of himself being taken away from this place, out of this possibility and into the reality where he now lived._

###

He feels the ache as soon as it is gone and he hurries to another door, this time he does not hesitate to pass through.

###

_“I kriffing hate sand!” Chewbacca growls in ascent as Ben and Chewie trudge through the desert, a familiar desert. “Kriffing Uncle Luke is too much of a big deal to run his own damn errands.” He looks over his shoulder. “I tell you what Chewie I think this is punishment for opting out of the noble calling of a Jedi to be a lowly pilot.” He snorts. “Not like they need those in the Resistance,' he mumbles grumpily._

_Ben looks into the distance; beyond the waves of heat rising from the blazing sand, he can see it. Finally._

_“There’s Niima Outpost,” he says to Chewie. “Let’s get the parts we need and get the hell off of this wasteland.”_

_They continue forward, kicking the sand as though to punish it for it existing, moving toward something. And even as he watches, he knows that Ben can feel it, the closer he gets to the outpost. There is something waiting for him there, something he had been searching for his entire life._

_###_

_There are children and he weeps, and he thinks he will weep for the rest of his life if that future is now beyond his grasp. There are trees and flowers and flowing crystal lakes all bursting at the seams with life._

_And Rey is alive like he has never seen her. She is sitting in the branch of a tree, a little girl in her lap, a little girl with black hair that flows freely and wildly in the wind, a little girl whose face glows with love, whose eyes are dark and thoughtful. And beside Ben, this Ben, this Ben who feels so close and so far from him now, is a boy. He’s older than the girl, lanky with ears that stick out from his brown hair. He is fiddling on the ground with a droid in his lap._

_Neither of these children have ever lived a day without love, neither of them have ever had to guess about their belonging in their own story._

_And he wants to scream and rage at the world, the Force, the Universe, his parents, himself- because of what Rey has been robbed of._

_###_

He continues down the corridor, into the grey and into the fading black, each door calling to him in a different way, each one speaking to some part of his soul, each one bringing him to some version of Rey, and, somehow, he loved every last one of them.

###

_They are standing out in the dark, under the shadow of the temple. Ben’s back is facing young Rey, his things gathered in a pack._

_“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I can’t stay here.”_

_“Yes, you can.” The desperation, the pleading in her voice is so familiar._

_“You don’t understand, you can’t understand.”_

_She tries to reach for him. The young Ben, dressed in the dirty, torn clothes of a padawan. But he jerks away. Stubborn fool. Her hand drops rejected and hurt. Even from where he stands, watching it happen, unable to stop it._

_“Then help me understand,” she said. “Please.”_

_Young Ben’s fingers snake through his thick black hair. Ben knows that gesture, he remembers it all too well. He would pull and yank at his locks, hoping that when he pulled them out, they would take the voices with them, that the pain would be louder than the shouted whispers (of Snoke, of Vader, of Palpatine, of his own damn demons)._

_“I can’t,” he says, his lip trembling. “It’s tearing me apart, and I can’t…I have to leave…If I stay, I don’t know what will happen. I don't know what I'll do.”_ _He takes a step forward and a choking sob from Rey stops him. He doesn’t turn around, but he stops. He can’t not stop, and a shudder of pain racks his body. "_ _I could hurt you.” The voice trembles, barely even a whisper._

_“You won’t,” she insists with painful certainty._

_He’s shaking now, sick with worry, with burden. "You can't know that._ _You know what I am, Rey.”_

_“You’re Ben Solo.” And, gods, the way she says his name. Like it’s the first time, every time; like it’s resuscitating dead parts of him, healing every scar and every wound. “You’re Ben Solo.”_

_He turns toward her, eyes blazing, teeth clenched. But she doesn’t flinch, it’s not toward her- it’s never toward her. “I’m a monster,” he all but screams. But it’s not a scream of rage, it’s a plea._

_“You’re not.” She raises her face to him, unafraid, chin high._

_“Then why did they lie,” he spat. “Why did they lie? Why did they let me find out about…about who I am in the most…” He drops to his knees, holding himself, a shaking ball of fear and loneliness. “They lied to me.”_

_She sits beside him, and somehow, she manages to gather the whole of the boy in her arms, her lips pressed to the top of his head._

_“You’re not a monster,” she whispers. “I don’t care who your grandfather is…You’re not a monster. You’re my Ben.”_

_The young Ben suddenly, abruptly jerks away, careful not to throw her off violently. He detaches himself from her arms and hurries to his feet, scrambling away from her reach. He wipes furiously at his nose and face, trying to hide the evidence of weakness._

_“I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t…”_

_She grabs his wrist from where she is kneeling on the ground. She’s looking up at him, her face bathed in the moonlight, open and naked with emotion._

_“Please Ben,” she says. “Please don’t go this way.”_

_It’s not him, and it’s him. And Ben can feel what he feels. He felt it in the throne room, the resignation, the knowing that there was no turning back._

_He pulls his hand from her and walks away._

_She cries out to him, but he does not turn._

_###_

_“Join me. Please.”_

_She wants to take his hand. She regards it for a moment, curiously. She looks over her shoulder at the fleeing rebellion being picked off, one by one by First Order ships._

_But there is something new in her eyes now. Something feral and wild, something deep and wanting, something brimming with power. That throne, still filled with Snoke's bisected body…that throne is for her. It was always meant for her._

_The corners of her beautiful mouth curve into a smile._

_She steps toward him. And this time she does not reach for the saber, this time she raises a regal hand, power in her fingertips, and she places it in his, the blood of an empress simmering in her veins._

_###_

He knows the light is waning. Each door reveals something new, progressively crueler and heartbreaking, but it’s always her, and it’s always him, through every door.

###

_She circles him, clothed in flowing black, a menacing smile and glowing yellow eyes._

_“If it’s not the boy I’ve heard so much about,” she coos, her voice like black velvet. Ben’s lightsaber is just out of reach, held down by four Sith Troopers. She drops down to his level, bobbing slightly and taking him in, curiously. “The last Skywalker.”_

_Ben snorts and spits blood onto the ground. “I’m a Solo,” he spits. “And an Organa. Also, pretty sure I got a few years on you, sweetheart so not sure who you’re calling boy?”_

_She smirks and leans closer and breathes in. “There’s Vader blood in you alright,” she says, almost reverently. She bites her lip and an eyebrow raises as she looks him up and down like a predator.“And so much darkness, Solo.”_

_“You know me, but I don’t know you,” he says. “Kinda rude wouldn’t you say?”_

_She stands, her black robes billowing around her. She looks down at him, both contemptuous and intrigued by the man before her. “You don’t know me, but you will. I am the Dark side made flesh. I am the end of the rebellion and the Jedi, and the rise of the Final Order. I am all of the Sith. I am Empress Palpatine and I will finish what my grandfather started. I…”_

_Ben seizes his moment, Force throwing the Sith Troopers off of him and calling his lightsaber back to his hand. It clashes with Rey’s red saber just in time. Their sabers lock and their eyes meet across the crackling blades._

_“Empress Palpatine,” he muses. “Can I offer you a bit of advice, Your Worshipfulness?” He shoves her back and then swings his saber, but she blocks it low, the Force of her swing sending vibrations down his arms. “Monologues cost the Emperor his life…may want to avoid those.”_

_He reaches behind him and pulls out his blaster and shoots, the bolt catching her in the shoulder. She does not yell or cry in pain, having long learned through cruel training how to put off such base sensations, but she stumbles back and it’s enough. It’s all he needs, and she is on the ground before him and his foot crushes the hand that holds her saber, locking it to the ground and pushing into the snowy ground. But even though she has lost the high ground, she looks up at him proud and defiant._

_Ben watches his own face in the Jedi who stands over the young empress, and across the universe, it remains the same. No matter where or when he looks at her, that look remains constant. The look in the forest when she called the saber. Already, he knows._

_The Jedi's saber hovers over Empress Palpatine, inches from her neck._

_Do it, a voice whispers in his ear. Kill her._

_“Do it,” she spits. “Kill me, Jedi.”_

_It’s a familiar voice, a voice that had haunted him as a child, so he lowers his saber, pulling it away from her._

_“No,” he says. “I saw something too, Princess,” he says. “When you were rooting around so rudely in my head for that dark. I saw something in your head too.”_

_Rey bares her teeth at him and throws him off with a Force wave. He jumps back, out of range as she leaps to her feet._

_“What could you possibly have seen in me other than the destruction of all you love?"_

_He backs away from her, saber ready. He looks up as a familiar shadow falls over the snow from just above their heads. His ride has finally arrived._

_“Conflict, sweetheart,” he says. “A hell of a lot of conflict.”_

_“Liar,” she spits, to harsh and too defensive to be convincing._

_He shrugs, dismissively, arrogantly, and her eyes flash yellow. She charges at him like an angry bull. But he jumps up, grabbing hold of the ramp of the hovering Falcon. As it rises, he dangles for a moment and looks down at her, the crackling red of her saber lighting her whole face._

_“See you around, Princess.”_

###

_He’s surrounded by sand; this place is familiar._

_And horrifying, but he doesn’t know why._

_He wants to cry. To scream. To drown out the loneliness, to sink into the sand to escape the desperate cries._

_He hears it; the scream._

_He turns and she’s there. A little girl, with three buns._

_She’s on a desert planet. Devoid of life. Alone._

_Alone._

_Always alone._

_She cries out to the sky. She cries for them to return._

_Cries that no one hears._

_Except him._

_She would not end as she began, some part of her screaming in a desert wasteland._

_He feels it now. He wonders if he felt it then. If it’s all happening, if it’s always happening, did he feel it across the universe when her loneliness first cried into the void?_

_He had always carried her in him, as she had carried him._

_One shared soul._

_Split across time and space and every infinite possibility._

_She can’t see him or hear him. All the same, he makes a promise to her, to her as a child, to her as Palpatine, to her as a Scavenger, to her as a Jedi, to her darkness and her light._

_And he thinks, maybe, against all odds that some part of her might hear it._

_“I’ll come back for you, sweetheart.”_


	3. The Rise of the Scavenger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All the Jedi must reconnect with the Scavenger inside in order to save Ben Solo.
> 
> *This is a highly expositional chapter, BUT that's what the Bendu is right?*

Atollon is not the loveliest planet she has seen in her travels, but it’s not the worst. It’s dry and hot, nothing that she is not used to, but as soon as she sets foot on the ground, she can feel it. She bends toward it and it bends toward her.

There is something powerful here, and somehow, it’s like she can breathe for the first time. She had always been at war with herself, in some way, the dueling parts of her not knowing how to live at peace, so they slept for a long while. It was the only way the little girl on Jakku could survive. She did not have words for the light and the dark at war in her, she still did not, and they were still fighting. But when she breathes in the air, when she pauses to consider the nature of what is flowing beneath her feet, the snarling animals within her body soften, they circle one another curious and wary, but for a moment they are not at odds.

For a moment they are balanced. 

“Stay here, BB-8,” she says over her shoulder. She does not know where to go- Maz gave no instructions, just the coordinates, the name of the planet, and the assurance that her next steps would be made clear when she arrived.

There is a dull red haze cast over the planet as if the very atmosphere is made of the same red dirt under her feet. It’s almost like something out of a dream. The hardened sand soon gives way to dirt, and dirt to tall grass that stretches upward toward the sky and above her head. But she continues to move forward. She places her hand against her chest and holds it over her heart. She can feel it stuttering there, limping and broken and fractured. But it’s alive, it’s pumping, moving her body forward, so he must be too. Her soul is broken but it’s intact.

She hears his name with every beat, reminding her of why she is here. The grass thickens and grows around her, but she shoves through it, forcing her way toward…something. That point that is drawing her close where she feels the Force tugging at her, like she is at the end of a long leash that she cannot see the end of.

But she senses something else too, something hedging closer- she senses fear. Her fingers twitch at Luke’s lightsaber at her side, prepared to grab hold. As soon as she does, she hears a clicking, the sound of skittering, the brush of the grass as it moves around her, flanking her beside and behind.

She runs faster, trying to outpace them. But they speed up. She pumps her arms and throws herself through the grass stumbling into a clearing. She whips around violently, teeth bared, and her lightsaber flashing against the darkening ground. She looks around frantically as something emerges from the grass and bushes surrounding the clearing. She can feel them. There are many of them and they are all afraid, and they are closing in on her.

They skitter toward her, legs and fangs clicking menacingly. She raises her saber and brandishes it, the creatures in front of her rear and hiss but she hears the ones behind her closing in. Their fear, their panic is dizzying, and her own self responds to it instinctively. She lashes out, swinging her saber until they skitter away. She is surrounded by noise. She can hear their hissing, her own pounding heart, the woosh of her saber as it cut through the air at the creatures around her, and, loudest of all, the hollow echo in her soul.

All of it is so loud.

So distracting.

She tastes the salt on the corner of her eyes as she slashes, stabs, and swings. Something is wrong; everything is wrong.

And she’s all alone, somehow both numb and feeling all things at once. And then, as quickly as they came, the creatures retreat into the woods and bushes, alerting her to the change in the thick, red air; suddenly heavier and electric, crackling with Force energy.

“Why are you so afraid of them, child? I think, perhaps, you did not always fear the darkness so. What has happened?” She turns around frantically trying to find the source of the voice; it is everywhere, and right beside her, filling the air.

She feels the earth breaking behind her, something shifting ground beneath her feet. She turns and she cannot stop her mouth from dropping open at the sight before. He is beautiful and fearsome, gnarled, and primal, as though birthed from the land itself. 

“Who…what…what are you,” she asks. The creature does not respond right away, but observes her curiously, reading her from the inside out.

“Who are you, little one,” it – he - asks finally, every word weighted with meaning, as though he were asking something that could only be found in the very depths of herself.

“I’m a Jedi,” she says. But her voice quakes. _A thousand generations live in her_ , Luke had said. She is now vessel. For all the Jedi They had come to her when she most needed them, but she still felt empty now; still incomplete.

She hears a chuckle in the voice, it is not threatening but there is something in it that frightens her. “Are you, now,” he says, it’s a question, but it’s not.

“What…what are you…”

“It does not matter what I am child,” he says. “It matters what you are.”

“I’m a Jedi…” she says again, even weaker this time. “I’m Rey. Rey…” she pauses, groping for a name desperately, an old fear rearing its head in the midst of her loneliness and confusion. She grabs onto it like a life raft. “Rey Skywalker.”

She is not certain if this creature has eyebrows, but she is quite certain that whatever its equivalent is raises speculatively. “Is that so?”

It does not wait for her to answer but slowly, thoughtfully, bends toward her. There is a part of her that wants to run from this creature, who seems to know so much, to say so much without saying anything. He looks at her and knows her.

“You are unbalanced, child,” he says. “Deeply unbalanced.” Its giant head moves closer to her. “Worse than I have ever seen, in fact.”

Rey snorts. “Thanks for that,” she says. “I came here for help but instead…”

Its giant body quakes as it moves even closer, and almost seems to inhale, tasting of the Force inside of her; but she does not feel drained. It does not feel like he is taking from her, rather that he is somehow turning it over in his hands, examining it.

“Fascinating,” he says, finally. “No wonder there is no balance. Your soul…” He pauses and closes his eyes as if to take a second look. "A part of it is missing.”

“Yes,” she says, excited and frantic, she can hear the fraying in her own voice at the hope of being understood. “I need it back,” she says. “I can feel him.” She covers her chest again and looks up at the creature, beseeching. “He’s not gone. I know it. He can still be saved. I can still bring him back.”

“Hmmm…” the creature pulls away from her and sits back, almost casually, on his haunches, if such a creature was capable of being casual. “Quite a predicament you find yourself in. But it was right of you to come to me.”

“Then you can help me,” she said, nodding eagerly. “You can…you can help me bring him back?”

“There are many things that are in your control and much that is not in your control,” he says. “But if your dyad is one with the Force already then it's too late to bring…”

“He’s not.” She surprises herself when she shouts it. “He’s not. Wherever he is, he is still holding on. I can feel it. I would know if he was beyond my reach. I would know.”

The creature scoffs, though not unkindly. “You barely even know yourself,” he says. “How can you be sure that you know him?”

“I know him,” she growls. She can feel the energy surging in her blood, under her skin, and to her fingertips. “I know him. And I know if it were me, he would burn the galaxy down to find me again.”

The creature laughs and shakes its giant head thoughtfully, as though reminiscing about something particularly amusing to him. “You remind me of someone,” he says. “Someone who once came here, I taught him something that I hope you will one day learn too.”

“What,” she asks. “Please tell me what I need to know,” she begs. She falls to her knees, without thinking, the red dirt staining the white pants. She moves toward him. “Please. I know I can still save him.”

“And well you may,” he says. “But you must learn the lesson.”

“Tell me.” It’s something between a demand and a plea. “Tell me what I need?”

“The past is powerful, child. The past has the power to redeem in ways that few can imagine, the building blocks of the future often lay there. So, it is true for the young, Ben Solo.”

“But it’s the past,” she says, her words catching in her throat. “How can I…”

“There is a place,” he says. “A place that you know well, a place you must return to. I think perhaps, you have forgotten it, angry that it did not show you what you believe it should have.” A musing noise rumbles from the creature. “But you know of where I speak, it has more to say to you if you are willing.”

She closes her eyes and she can feel it, the cold, the isolation, the loneliness, the blistering anger. “It said nothing of the truth of…” her voices stutters with betrayal. “Of where I came from.”

“You came from many places,” the creature says. “The same is true for young Solo. Many things made you, including your blood. You must gather those things that made him if you want to be reunited with your soul.”

“So, I go back to the cave,” she says. “But when I was there, all I saw was me.”

“Him…you…in a dyad it makes little difference, his soul, his past, and his future, are inextricably tied to you,” he says. “You cannot redeem the future without reclaiming the past, for both of you. You do this not through hiding and burying, but by finding, searching, gathering and remembering.” Searching, gathering, finding-something inside of her comes alive. She is all the Jedi. But she is still a Scavenger, and she would be whatever she needed to be to save him. “It is through the radical act of remembering, of bearing witness to our past, that we rebuild the future.”

Her past. It should be settled, buried. It’s done. She is the last Jedi, she is all the Jedi- but still so empty, still so alone.

“So I must return to the cave then,” she says. “And see what else it has to show me.”

“You went there once searching for your past,” he says. “Now you must return if the future that you once saw is still to be redeemed.” Rey bit her lip hard, hard enough to draw blood. That future that had been so close. She had seen it in his eyes when he had arrived at Exogal, new, reborn, hopeful for the first time. She choked back the cruelty of it all. “You must gather the broken parts of him and bring them back together if you want to heal this broken bond, and then take them to where it all began, where the first wound fell, where that first bond was broken in a way it never should have been. Only then will the Force show you the path to be taken.”

Rey nods, girding herself inwardly. She did not think she would come here and have the answers handed to her. The Force, it seemed, never worked that way, everything was hard, obscured in a haze of what-if’s, paths taken and not taken. She thought, at first, it was to teach a lesson to those who sought knowledge, to weed out the impatient and hard-hearted. But she was beginning to think that it was just a Force, moving and flowing with malleable and unpredictable humans, adjusting and accounting for all the ways the universe may triumph and fall.

An inexhaustible source of grace, perhaps because it sees all that could be.

“Thank you,” she says, with a nod. She wants to say more, to ask questions, to continue to breathe on this strange planet, flowing so freely with dark and light. “I have to hurry.”

She turns to walk away, unsure of how to dismiss herself from something like this. “Wait.” He does not use the Force to stop her, but he may as well have for how quickly she stopped and turned back around to look at it.

“I have one more gift for you,” he says. He opens his giant clawed hand in front of her, at the center rests a glinting, yellow Kyber crystal. She exhales, sharply. She had yet to see one, unused and unbroken. She goes to take it delicately between her fingers but pauses and looks up to meet his glowing eyes. 

“I have a saber,” she says, her voice trembling.

He doesn’t say anything but continues to hold his hand out to her, before she grasps it, and pulls away abruptly, stumbling backward.

“At the heart of the dyad is balance,” the creature says to her, as she holds the Kyber crystal up to her eyes, watching the intricacies and faces catch the waning light of the planet. “I’ve grown weary of holding the balance alone, restore the dyad and healing may yet come for the galaxy.” It would be the perfect time to learn more about the dyad, what it means, why it exists, its purpose in the Force, but she has a feeling that if it were necessary to know that the creature would have told her already. “But know this, when we fear our past, we orchestrate the very future we most fear.” There is something in his words that shake her, something beyond the words, as if they are being spoken over the whole of the universe that lives inside of her. “Do not forget that Rey…” he pauses and looks at her probingly, questioningly, almost mockingly, if something so ancient and grave is capable of mockery “…Skywalker.”

He says it like a test, like he is looking for something from her. But she doesn’t know what. What name should she give if not that one? She clings to it like a child, and right now, when everything is falling apart around her, she doesn’t know how to let it go. She is a Skywalker. If she’s not, then she’s…

She shakes her head and looks at the creature again. “Thank you,” she says. “For all your help.”

She _is_ a Skywalker.

She is a Skywalker.

She repeats it over and over, as she runs through the dirt, the grass, past the native creatures that rear back away from her.

She repeats it until the words become like heavy stones in her mouth.

She repeats it as a mantra, willing her legs to keep moving.

She _is_ a Skywalker.

She _must_ be.

If she’s not, then…what does she have left?


	4. Never Tell Me the Odds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben finally gets to talk to Anakin about how to get back to Rey.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!
> 
> I know this is slow-moving, much more internal than external. But I promise some action is coming after this chapter! :)

Grief was nothing new to Anakin. His life, his living life, had been marked with it from beginning to end- with a few moments of flickering light, in the end, it was enough. It was enough to save him, to anchor him to his humanity in ways he did not deserve.

He did not know he could know grief as keen as he had in life until he heard his grandson calling to him. He had tried, despite what Ben believed, but taking on the form of a force ghost is a painful process, extracting oneself from the Force is no easy task.

And there had been another voice, obscuring his, louder than his, a cruel mockery of his that spoke loudest to the young Ben’s tormented heart.

He did not know he could know grief so keen after death as he did while watching Ben make the same mistakes he had. He did not blame his children, that they buried his past. His name, his dark name, and his worst sins should not have been chains for his children to bear. 

And yet…

He had to watch Ben do just that. He did not know that such grief was still to be had, a high cost for his sins.

And he did not know there was still healing to be had. He was a part of the Force, after all, his wounds, in theory, should have healed. But when Ben found the strength to crawl out of that pit, when he saw Ben embrace love-not power- to heal, to connect, something inside of Anakin had healed as well; an open wound, old and festering, finally closed.

But he could see in his grandson’s eyes, that his wounds were not healed, something broke in him and the Scavenger girl when death came.

And he sees as Ben emerges from the last door, that he will not go quietly. 

“What can I do,” he asks, his body tense and his fists clenched. “How do I get back to her, how…” his voice tightens, and he points at one of the doors, any of them. “How…how do I give her a chance at this….”

Anakin breathes in deeply. There is a way. But so much of it depended on Rey, so much of it depended on decisions, actions, moments that Anakin could not see right now. Ben will not be able to return alone.

“You still have options, Ben,” he says, “It’s not too late to become one with the Force.” Anakin steps forward and places a hand gently on Ben’s shoulder. “I can’t tell you how beautiful it is, how peaceful it is…you…you have earned your peace.”

The finger, long and trembling with emotion, is suddenly in Anakin's face, angry and shaking with accusations. “No,” he growls through clenched teeth. “No...I don’t care how perfect it is. I don’t care what kind of paradise it is. Rey is…” Ben is shaking now, and he seems so young again, filled with anger, sadness, and regret. “She’s alone. I can feel her.” Anakin sees so much of himself in that moment. Ben is feeling so much, his hands splayed across his chest, where Rey had poured her life into him. “She’s alone, and she shouldn’t be. This isn’t right.” He shakes his head stubbornly. Anakin had never been good at hiding his emotions, despite the efforts of the Jedi, and neither is Ben. He can see everything inside the young man. “Please…” he says, finally. “Please…help me get back to her.”

Anakin feels both soaring pride and deep sadness. “Yes,” he says. “Yes. There is a way.”

Ben’s eyes light up, and god, if he isn’t Leia, Han, Luke, and his mother all rolled into one; in a flash of his eyes, he sees the stubborn and tenacious hope of the Skywalkers. “Tell me.”

Anakin nods. “When someone becomes one with the Force, they cannot come back as anything more than a ghost.” Ben nods hurrying him along. Impatient, like…well, everyone in his family. “But you cannot go back on your own and you cannot go back from here. This is a midway place for you, a liminal space between your two options, both open to you because of the dark and the light.”

Fear prickles at Anakin’s words. He did not know what the future held for his grandson if he made this choice. If Ben failed, or Rey failed, Ben would be doomed for eternity, the sacrificial lamb, the last victim of Anakin’s sins. But he would not take this choice from Ben.

Ben’s whole life had been a series of choices snatched away from him. This will not be the same. “If you are of the light, the good, we become one with the Force, but there is a place where those who are of the dark go when they die, the dark region of the Netherworlds.” Ben continues to stare at him, unfazed, foolish, and stubborn. “It has been called many things by Jedi, the Void, Chaos, Hell; it’s filled with darkness, suffering, and unnatural evil. But, unlike becoming one with the Force, it is possible to come back from Chaos, but only just. It has happened only a few times in recorded history.” Anakin can see it in the boy's narrowed eyes, the muscle jumping in his jaw, the determined energy coiling inside of him. “It is a cruel place, Ben,” he says, “ruled by the power of the Sith. And you may well be trapped there forever.” He wants to dissuade him. “The odds of you making it out are…”

Ben cocks his head to the side and fixes his grandfather with a look that was all too familiar. “And the odds of me seeing her again if I don’t?”

“Right,” Anakin says, with a nod. “Then I guess the best I can do is tell you how to get there.”

“Finally,” sighed Ben in relieved in frustration. “Tell me what I have to do?”

“Chaos is for those who are conflicted, whose dark is stronger than their light.”

“So I’ll fit right in,” Ben says with a dismissive shrug.

Anakin rolls his eyes but continues. “You were stalled here because of your last moments of conflict, of unease, you died without peace. And now, if you want to pass into Chaos you must give in to that conflict, give into that unbalance, and give in to the darkness?”

“Give into the darkness, huh,” he says, “I guess this is my time to shine then.”

Anakin snorts. “You’re a pain in the ass kid.”

“So, I’ve heard.”

Anakin steps toward him. “I’ll help you,” he says. “But you may find it harder than you think. You’ve been fighting the darkness and the light for so long, but this time embrace it, don’t run from it.”

Anakin worries that perhaps he is handing his own grandson the knife that will sever him completely from all hope and life. But Ben is strong, Ben has held the darkness in him, and the light, and maybe, just maybe, the mistake was being so afraid of the darkness.

“Don’t be afraid,” Anakin says, as much to himself as to the man in front of him.

“I’m not,” he says. And Anakin believes him, there is no doubt in his eyes. There is no future in his imagining in which he is not at Rey’s side. Anakin holds out his hand. Ben raises his own, tentatively placing it in Anakin’s palm, and Anakin, instinctively, brushes a tender thumb over his knuckles. He feels Ben’s fingers tense.

“Ben,” he whispers. Ben looks down, at his hand and Anakin’s, and he swallows hard, every emotion roaring violently across his face. “I am so, incredibly sorry for…everything.”

Ben inhales deeply and closes his eyes tight, and Anakin wonders how he survived so long, being so filled with emotions and hating himself for every last one. “You were there,” he says, finally. “You woke me up.” Ben nods. “I saved her.”

Anakin squeezes Ben’s hand tight. “Yes,” he says. “You saved her. No matter what happens next, she’s alive because of you.” There is no higher praise that Anakin can give him now, no value that Ben can see in himself except that Rey is in the world over him. And that breaks Anakin’s heart.

“Now,” says Anakin. “It’s time to go.”

Anakin reaches into himself, into Ben, and finds those places that are so familiar; filled with rage, filled anger, filled with power, and, at its core, hurt. He urges Ben into the darkness, they teeter at the edge and then give themselves fully into the conflict and the dark.

The only way for Ben’s soul to be whole again.

###

The pieces of the lightsaber fall, clattering loudly against the floor of the Falcon, scattering violently as Rey’s concentration breaks and she falls forward onto all fours, bowled over by the abrupt sensation of being jerked violently, something inside of her straining against unbearable force.

She gasps violently, trying to catch her breath through the stabbing sensation in her chest. She panics for a moment and rolls onto her back.

“No…” she gasps. “No…no…no…” she sits up and looks around frantic and desperate. “B..ben…Ben…please, please don’t go. Don’t be gone.” She sits up and closes her eyes, trying to clear her mind, trying to find him, searching across the Force for anything that would give her hope that he was still there. She feels maimed, wounded, broken, naked- something is missing. Something is wrong.

_“I’ll come back for you, sweetheart.”_

She can hear it. Clear and solid for the first time. She had thought, for so long, that it had been a dream, something she had tricked out of her unconscious, something to cling to during the lonely nights on Jakku.

But now she can hear it, free, not clouded behind the mask or weighted with burden, a voice that she could not have recognized because she never had been able to hear it, but she is certain all the same.

It’s the voice of Ben Solo.


	5. Better Now?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben makes a new friend in Chaos, and Rey scavenges a bit of Alderaan to bring Ben home.

When Ben first stirs from unconsciousness it is from the smell of burning flesh and screams, of desperate pleas and sprawling shadows, from the littered bodies of fallen children, remnants of darkness shared with him before he was ripped from that in-between place into wherever he now finds himself. They weren't his memories- he carries so much inside of him that does not belong to him. When he fully wakes it is to the feel of sharp, pointed teeth gnawing at his calf.

He wakes with a start and thrashes his legs violently outward in the direction of the predator, kicking up a thick cloud of red and black dirt.

“Kriffing hell,” he gasps, as he scrambles shakily to his feet. He takes a few staggering steps on them, as though he were learning to walk for the first time. He stumbles backward into something hard and jagged; his hands move against the rough surface as he blinks through the smoke and dirt clouding his vision and his lungs.

He looks down at his legs. There is a hole chewed out of the fabric on his right leg, and a few shallow divots of gathered blood.

He looks back in the direction of where he was laying, the dirt now settling. It’s still dark and there are plenty of places to hide. He keeps his back pressed against the stone face behind him and reaches down to grab a heavy, jagged rock, the only weapon within grabbing distance.

He closes his eyes and tries to concentrate, to reach out and sense the movement of the creature hiding in the shadows. But he finds instead a cold, black hole of nothingness.

Chaos.

He tries to reach through it, to break through the tangle of darkness and pain, toward something. The Force is here, he knows that, nothing is beyond its reach, but…

He can’t quite grasp it.

“I’m sorry, sire…” He opens his eyes at the small voice, hidden away. It echoes over the walls of the climbing chasm that surrounds him. He looks up to see the tops of a jagged mountain reaching toward a scorched sky. “I thought you were dead," the voice continues. Ben steps forward toward it. “Please,” the small voice sobs. “Please don’t hurt me. I…I…”

Ben moves closer to the rock, to the small form huddled behind it, pressed between the boulder and the mountain it crumbled from. It’s small, whatever it is. Ben goes down to one knee and whoever, whatever it is, retreats further away from him.

“I thought because you didn’t have a chain that you were dead or an animal or…”

“A chain…” he begins to ask, interrupted by a clash of lightning and thunder, the red bolt igniting the sky in a deep, blood-red. The creature squeals and squeezes into an even tighter ball. Ben sighs and leans back against the mountain, waiting for the noise and the light to die. He discards the rock he had picked up as a weapon, hoping that whatever it is that is hidden behind the boulder is every bit as harmless as it sounds. When the noise fades, he looks back into the dark crevice, the small form remains unmoved. “What do you mean a chain,” he asks finally.

The creature does not respond for a while, and then Ben hears the shuffling and then an emaciated leg emerges from the shadows, around the blistered ankle is a heavy metal cuff. But it is not attached to anything, no chain or hooks. It's just a cuff. 

“…it chains us here,” it-she?- says, retracting her foot immediately back into the safety of darkness. “It chains us all here to this place, to the Master."

Ben leans his head back against the mountain and looks up into the sky again. It looks sick and diseased, like nothing he has ever seen. He had seen plenty of dead planets, planets festering with the dark side of the Force, but nothing that looked quite like this.

From the corner of his eye, he sees the shivering ball unfold slightly. Ben turns to look into the darkness again, the creature pauses, but is closer now inching out from behind her stony shield. He could reach into the crevice and grab it if he wanted too at this point, but he had no desire to scare it more than it already was.

“You have a Master,” he asks.

The creature continues to tentatively move out from behind the rock. Ben scoots away a bit, giving more room. When it steps out into the light, tentative and shy, Ben is taken aback.

It is not a monster, despite the fact that his own blood still glinted on its tiny, razored teeth. If anything, Ben is sure it’s a child, but not of any kind he has ever seen. She (at least he think it may be female), is small, shorter than Artoo, with a short trunk for a nose, and an eye far too big for her face. Just one eye. Where her other eye should be is a valley, scabbed and unhealed. Her skin is almost translucent showing the glowing red veins that webbed beneath it.

“Who are you,” she asks, finally.

For a moment, Ben doesn’t know what to say. He has yet to actually speak his name to anyone, it’s so foreign to him. Snoke had thrown it at him derisive and cruel, a way to belittle him in training and stoke his anger. And Rey…He closes his eyes, briefly, catching her smile, pure and joyful, and the way she said his name….

“I’m Ben,” he says finally. He lays his head back against the stone wall behind him, resting for a moment.

“Don’t you wanna know who I am,” she asks, a hint of indignation in her voice. He cracks open one eye and looks at her, as soon as he does, she shrinks away from him, as though ready to run back behind the rock.

“You’re right,” he says, with a nod. “Sorry, it’s been a rough couple of days. What’s your name?”

She looks up at him again, and looks away shyly at the ground, kicking at the dirt with her hooked toes. “Ummm…I…” she looks up and around, groping for a name to offer him. “What’s a name you like,” she asks, finally.

Ben shrugs, non-committal. “I think you should pick one that you like, kid.”

Her mouth twists slightly and she cocks her head to the side. “I like that one,” she says.

“Which one?”

“Kid,” she repeats, the word experimental on her tongue before she nods firmly. “Yes,” she says. "My name is Kid.”

The corners of his mouth quirk into a still unfamiliar smile, but his body is slowly remembering it. “I like it,” he says. “So, tell me, Kid. What are you doing out here on your own?”

Kid bit her thin, bloodless lip and flopped onto the ground beside him, her hand instinctively reaching out to pick at the tender flesh around her ankle, peeling back the scabs.

“Hey,” scolds Ben. He leans over and swats her hand away. She retracts it and hisses at him, baring her teeth menacingly. Ben rolls his eyes, dismissively. “Knock that off,” he says. “Now tell me,” he says. “What are you doing out here alone?”

She eyes him suspiciously, as he rips away a bit of his own torn pant leg, tattered from where her teeth had ripped a hole.

“We were sent out by the Master to find food,” she says. “It’s hard to come by in this place.”

“Do you need food here,” he asks, pulling her foot toward him. Her eyes narrow and the talons at the edge of her feet tense but she does not kick him away.

“The Master does,” she says. “And the slaves do. But there are also spirits here,” she whispers, looking up at the sky. “They serve the Master, but they do not need food.”

Her fingers itch around the open wounds at her ankle but she looks at Ben and stops herself from picking at the flesh there. “We came out for food,” she says. “And a Leviathan attacked us. Ate everyone up, greedy monsters. Everyone except me.” It falls casually on her young voice in a disturbing way. “I’m sure my momma thinks I’m dead too.” She gestured at his leg, where she had been gnawing at him. “I thought you were dead, and I was so hungry.”

Ben snorts and shrugs. “Yeah, it happens to the best of us.” He looks down at her foot, where the iron had rubbed her skin away. “Can I wrap this up for you?”

She looks at him, tentatively. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she says with a shrug.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t feel good does it?”

She snorts, derisively. “Nothing feels good here.”

Ben nods and looks down at her foot. He wishes he could heal it for her. He isn’t cut off from the Force here, not in the least. The Force is strong here, but it’s so dark that it feels like death, that it smells like death. He is no stranger to the dark side, but never so absolutely dark. And he is not certain what Force energy he would pass to her if he were to heal her, but he very much doubted that it would be of life.

“How did you get here,” he asks. “In…”

“Chaos,” she finishes with a nod. “I’ve always been here.”

“Yes, but how long? How old are you?”

“I’ve always been here, for as long as I’ve been alive.”

“But…” Ben tries to reframe the question, in some framework that she may understand, but his head is pounding and when he opens his mouth, he gets a fresh inhale of the poisonous air around him. “So,” he says. “How do you get out?”

Her eyes widen and she looks over her shoulder, up to the sky, and around him. “You don’t… you can’t…” Her voice is frantic and frightened. “Don’t say stuff like that, the Master might hear you!”

“Okay…okay…calm down,” he says. “Just hypothetically. I’m guessing there isn’t a front door?”

Kid purses her mouth and squints her eye appraisingly. “Well,” she says, her brow furrowing thoughtfully. “No front door, but there is…there is a gate.”

“A gate,” he muses. “That sounds promising. Is the gate a way out?

She cocks her head to the side. “No, I told you there’s no …OWEEE!” She lashes out, her claws catching his forearm, tearing his sweater and skin.

“Kriff, Kid,” he yelps, shaking his arm violently. “What the hell?!”

“Sorry…sorry…sorry,” she says, hurriedly, shrinking away from him. “I just…I didn’t mean to…”

Ben looks over the open gash, it’s long but not so deep. “It’s…It’s fine,” he mutters. He exhales and blows up the bit of hair that had flopped in front of his eyes. She is looking at him, her eye gleaming with tears. “Hey,” he says. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I yelled at you. I…” he shrugs. “I have a short temper,” he says.

She nods and scoots closer to him again and stretches out her foot, offering it to him. “It hurts,” she says, her lip quivering.

“Yeah,” he says, taking it gently in his hands. “I know, Kid. I know.”

###

Rey does not hesitate this time, she does not tentatively kneel at the opening, filled with fear and uncertainty. That girl who had gone into the cave was not the same as the woman she is now, returning, for the third time to this island. This time, without hesitation, without fear, she leaps through the opening and into the water.

She does not flail and wonder if this is the end for her.

She does not go to the mirror hoping to see her parents.

She does not go to the mirror wondering about who she is.

Suddenly, somehow, none of it matters more than the man she had run to after she reemerged, wet and trembling, reborn into something new altogether. She is different now, somehow both braver and more afraid, both more whole and more fractured, more confident and more uncertain.

But she knew this time what she was looking for. Something that went beyond just what was behind her or in front of her, something she trusts her soul to tell her when she needs to know it. It is after all her soul, and his. She need only trust the Force that fused them together.

When she falls into the mirrored world, she does not fight it, but gives herself fully to whatever it may show her. She lets herself fall into each new space, each iteration of herself. She does not linger at anyone, she pushes herself forward again and again, until, suddenly, she stops. She does not know if she does it on her own, or if there is something outside of her but she knows when to stop this time.

But, instead of looking forward, this time she turns, she steps out of line, and finds herself falling into the cold unknown.

###

It's odd that the first thing she would think after passing through a place so rich in Force power, after stepping, inexplicably into a world she would normally be separated from by time and space is that these are the shiniest floors she has ever seen.

They are polished to a sparkle that makes her eyes ache, and she can see herself fully reflected in them. She is here. She reaches up and touches her cheek, checking for her own physicality. She looks up at the high ceilings.

It’s a strange place, entirely unfamiliar to her, luxurious beyond anything she could imagine. She is almost distracted from her goal when the sound of bare feet slapping against the hard floor brings her back into focus. She quickly maneuvers against a cold stone pillar, pressing her back to it and hiding out of sight.

She can hear whoever it is pattering across the floor rush past her.

“Momma…momma…Where are…”

The voice stops and Rey covers her mouth with her hand, trying to hide herself in the midst of the silence, and then she hears it too, the quiet sounds of stifled cries and sniffling. Rey peaks out from around the pillar. The boy is standing outside a cracked door, ears poking out unapologetically from a mop of black hair.

The boy, who can only be Ben, who somehow looks so much like the grown man who is as much her as any bloodline that she may carry, reaches his hand out and cracks the door open.

“Momma,” he says.

Rey can hear a voice on the other side.

“Sweetheart.”

And Rey’s heart quickens, because it’s unmistakably her. Perhaps on impulse, Rey flings herself out from behind the pillar and hurries toward the door. She presses herself hard against the wall and peaks in through the crack in the door.

She can only see the side of her face, but it’s her. She is younger, but the weight of the galaxy is still heavy on her shoulders. Rey can see the red-rimmed eyes and the traces of tears on her cheeks. In one hand she holds an object lovingly in her palm, while the other cups the mole-spattered cheek of the little boy.

“Why cwy, momma?”

The voice is young and still stumbles around certain syllables, but there is a weight and a worry to his voice, as though the sight of his mother crying was not something he was used to, an indulgence that Leia rarely took.

“I’m fine,” she says, her thumb rubbing under her eye. And it strikes Rey as odd, how different Ben is from his mother. Leia was passionate, but never so tumultuous as her son. Ben, only a few years old, already seems to have a storm in his eyes, threatening to spill at any moment.

“Wha dis?”

Ben points to the object in her hand, tracing a path behind Leia’s fingers.

“This…” her voice is softer than Rey had ever heard it. “This is you, Ben. It’s you, and me. My mother gave this to me when I was little, like you.” Ben’s eyes are fixed on it, brow furrowed in intense concentration. “This is the crest of Alderaan.”

“Mother,” he repeated, like a question.

“Yes,” says Leia. “Like I’m your momma, I had a momma once too.”

“Where she?”

Rey can hear her Leia breathe in deep, settling herself against the innocent, inquiries of her child, uncertain of how to answer to them. “She’s in me,” says Leia. “And in you, little Starfighter,” she ruffles Ben’s hair lovingly, but he pulls away, not cruelly but as if he is too busy focusing on the crest in Leia’s hands. It’s a weighty topic, but Ben seems to hear what was unsaid, never one to linger in pretense or indulge the pretense of others.

He looks back up at Leia, brown eyes wide and searching. Leia holds his gaze more a moment before dropping her head, unwilling to show him the war in her own eyes. Ben looks back down at the crest and regards it for another moment before he takes it from Leia and crawls onto the couch with her. He stands up, balancing precariously on the cushion. Leia looks as though she is about to direct him off the couch, but he dodges her grasp and pushes on her shoulder, urging her to create space between her back and the couch.

Leia looks over her shoulder but waits to see what it is he plans to do as he wedges himself behind Leia. He perches on the top of the couch and leans forward resting his cheek momentarily on the crown of her head.

Rey is not sure when her heart breaks, but it’s somewhere after Ben begins to run his tiny fingers through the curtain of thick brown hair, back and forth, watching it fall over his hands like water, and before he begins to hum a low, melodical tune. It is practiced, and Rey wonders how often Leia would soothe him by running her hands through his hair or singing the same tune to silence the voices in his head, perhaps the song itself is a piece of Alderaan that Ben holds inside of him without even knowing.

As she watches him, this little prince of Alderaan whose legacy was so much more than Vader, her heart breaks for him. Her heart breaks as he winds and folds his mother’s hair into a clumsy braid. He reaches over her shoulder and holds out his hand expectantly.

Leia laughs, sincere and quivering with emotion, and presses the crest into his hand. Ben opens it, a hair clip, and clumsily clips her braid atop her head. The braid is scraggly and uneven and the clip is not holding it effectively, but he looks over his work carefully, patting it and tucking it until he is pleased.

He is not chatty, but the room is heavy and thick with intimacy, and Rey fights the urge to look away as Ben climbs down the couch and plants himself in front of his mother. He raises a hand and presses it to her cheek, mimicking Leia’s motion.

“Better now, momma?”

Leia presses her forehead to Ben’s and closes her eyes tight. When she opens them, they are filled with love and affection, with worry and bittersweet joy.

“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “Did you want to go play outside before I have to go to work?”

Ben continues to look at her, eyes darting back and forth, as though looking at her with both eyes at once will convince him that she is in fact okay. He nods and Leia stands, the jostling motion forcing the clip from her braid and falling on the couch.

“Ohhh nooo,” protests Ben. But Leia laughs and shakes out the braid. Rey wonders if they did practice- if they had any days spent in teaching young Ben how to execute an Alderaanian braid.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she says. “We can practice again later.”

Rey hurries from the door back to the pillar out of eyeshot from either of them. She does spare one fleeting look as they walk down the hallway, hand-in-hand, and Rey wonders if Palpatine is already present in a way that no one could imagine, if there is already an imperceptible wedge driven between mother and son, only kept at bay by the weight of their love. 

When they are out of earshot, Rey hurries into the room where the hair clip lays abandoned on the couch. She feels a stab of guilt. It belongs to Leia, from her own mother, an artifact of a home now lost. Rey picks it up reverently and clasps it between her hands.

“I promise,” she whispers, to herself and to Leia. “This will get back to where it belongs.”

She clasps it to her chest and closes her eyes tight. Her blood plummets to her feet, and the rush of cold overtakes her as if she is plunging once again into the water. But she holds tight to the crest, this sign of Alderaan, this piece of Ben.

###

“Better now, Kid?”

Kid looks at him and shakes out her foot. It isn’t healed, far from it, but the cuff is no longer brutally rubbing on her chapped and bleeding skin, a small mercy, but a mercy, nonetheless.

“Thank you,” she says, softly. “I wish…I wish there was a way out for you.”

“Well,” he says. “The Gate seems as good a place to start as any.” Ben stands up and sees for the first time how small she is, the top of her head reaching just a little past his knee. She’s a child, no matter how old or how long she has existed in this place, she is still a child. “What’s your plan, Kid?”

“Wait,” she says.

“For what?”

She looks up at him, her gaze resigned and forlorn. “Until food comes along. I can’t make it to the Citadel. Better I stay somewhere I can hide.”

Ben looks down at her and then back out at the valley stretched before him. “Look,” he says, finally. “I don’t know my way around here like you do, Kid,” he says. “If I get you back to the Citadel will you tell me where the Gate is?”

She scrunches her nose and shakes her head. “No…no…no… it’s better that we both stay here,” she says. “There are more leviathan, smoke demons, Terantatek’s, and silooth between us and the Citadel!”

Ben recognizes some of the names from Sith legends and folklore, but, foolishly maybe, they do not give him pause. Staying here was not an option. He would face and defeat every possible Sithspawn to get out of here. He had died once; he could do it again if he had too.

Ben kneels down next to her. “Look, Kid,” he says. “I won’t tell you what you should do, if you think it’s safer for you to stay here then you should. But I have someone waiting for me on the other side of the gate and I have to get back to her.”

Kid's whole body is quivering, she looks over Ben’s shoulder at the wasteland before them and back at him. “You’ll get me back to my mother,” she asks. “You’ll protect me and get me back to my mother.”

“Yes,” he says. “I will.”

He knows not to make promises that he cannot keep. But he can’t afford to entertain that this promise can’t be kept. There is no option except to get out of here, and whatever it took to accomplish that.

“So, what do you say,” he says. “I get you to your mother and you tell me how to get to the Gate.”

Kid nods and takes his hand in hers, her tiny fingernails curling into his skin. “Alright, Ben,” she says. “You have a deal.”

Ben loosens his fingers to pull away, to turn and begin their trek. But her fingers tighten, desperate and afraid. He casts one more look down at her.

“I’m scared, Ben,” she says.

He opens his mouth, something on the tip of his tongue telling her not to be afraid. But it dies there. Instead, he wraps his own fingers back around hers, allowing her to hold tight to him.

“There’s nothing wrong with being scared, Kid,” he says.

She swallows hard and nods. He waits for her to take the first step, to guide him in the direction of the Citadel, she steps forward. Brave. Afraid. And clinging tight to his hand.


	6. Worst Fears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey finds the young boy, Ben, and she hears the voices in his head. Ben says no more voices in his head.

While she’s a fine enough guide, it turns out that Kid is not a reliable source of information about Chaos. She doesn’t know what he means when he talks about the Force, but she shivers when he talks about the darkness that seems to live and breathe and feed off of this place. She does not seem to have a conception of time and has very little to say about the Master.

“Few of us see the Master,” she says. “I never have. The spirits here do the Master’s bidding and they relay the Master’s bidding to us.”

“What kind of spirits?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know what kind of different spirits there are, but these ones are cruel and angry, and they torture us because they can.” She looks up at Ben. “The smoke demons even know what we are most afraid of and it feeds them, and the Master.”

She lets her hand slip out of Ben’s and then she moves to his other side to take his other hand. It’s the third time she has done this, giving the reaching shoulder a break every few hours. If it’s been hours.

He’s already beginning to lose track of time as well.

“What are you most afraid of Ben,” she asks.

He raises an eyebrow and looks down at her, playing at suspicion. “If you’re secretly a smoke demon trying to figure out what I’m scared of, you’ll need to work on your tact a little.”

“I’m not a smoke demon,” she whines. “But you better figure out what you’re most scared of in case we come across one. It can drive you mad, especially if you don’t know what's coming.”

He hasn’t given it much thought.

Once it was Luke, saber wielded above his head.

Then it was Snoke.

He’s not sure what nightmares a creature like that would trick out of his mind given the chance.

“What are you most scared of Kid,” he asks finally. Kid continues to look forward as they walk. She tugs at his arm, signaling for him to lift her up as they approach another large rock in their path. Small enough for her to go around, but she wants him to lift and swing her high over the rock. A kid in Chaos is still a kid, it seems. So he obliges, lifting his arm, barely having to compensate for her slight tug and he swings her over the rock and back onto solid ground.

“When I saw a smoke demon for the first time,” she says. “I saw myself cold and alone, and I didn’t know where my mother was.” She nods. “We were separated, and I couldn’t get back to her. No matter how hard I wanted to. I didn’t stop crying for two days, I couldn’t work or eat.” She stops and points at her eye. “The Massassi punished me by taking away my eye.” She points at the wound with her free hand as if Ben needed more clarification. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t really know what to say, how to make it better for her or for anyone. This place seems wrong, in every way. He couldn’t make sense of any of it. This whole place seems incongruous with a Force that, supposedly, is built on life and compassion and connection, a place so wicked, designed to punish, even if it is dark-side users, did not make sense to him. 

Even less so why someone like Kid would be here.

“But that…” she says, her voice bringing him back to the present. He looks down at her, and then to where she is pointing, “comes into a close second for what I’m most afraid of.

He nods, understanding, at the towering crumbling mountain that seems to disappear into the sky above them.

“Let me guess,” he says. “That’s the only way out, huh?”

“Out of the valley,” she says with a nod. She looks up at him. “We could still stay here and hide, and maybe someone will come looking for us, one day.”

Ben sighs and rakes his hand through his hair. “Not a risk I’m willing to take, Kid.”

“Okay,” she says, with a shrug. “Then I guess we’re climbing out of here.”

###

Rey feels Ben this time, well before she sees him. It is a dark cold night, and now she's outside a small house, less grand but still nicer than anything she would have dreamed living in. She hears him before she finds the window to his quarters. He feels more like the Ben who births Kylo Ren; a tempest of rage and confusion, and the betrayal that comes only when one feels the deepest kind of love. She looks inside to the dark room, at the small bed that jostles and groans with every thrash of his gangly body.

She can hear his thoughts, louder than the moans and screams of a tortured sleep. Inside his mind, she can hear the echoes of hushed whispers, never meant for his ears.

“What do we do with him?”

_“He’s so angry…”_

_“The staff are frightened…”_

_“I feel like I don’t even know him.”_

_“So powerful…”_

_“Luke will know…”_

While the words are real, Rey has enough distance to see the way they are twisted, amplified, and warped in Ben’s young mind by a power far beyond his reach. The whispers become shouts, and words spoken in desperation become barbed and jagged against his delicate psyche. He can't tell the difference between what is real and what is not, and what is a perversion of the truth. 

She can hear him sobbing into his pillow and when she looks, his hands are tangled in his hair, jerking painfully at the locks. His whole body is strained and rigid. He drops one hand and it forms a fist, he pounds it into his mattress, again and again and again and again.

Rey wants to call out to him, to ease his sleep, even if it’s just for a night. But instead, she waits, painfully, and listens. She can hear him pacing now, out of bed and awake, Sidious’ poison already flowing in his veins as he desperately tries to bleed himself of it. He screams and something breaks, and it takes all her strength not to reveal herself, not to offer him the comfort that he so desperately needs, the understanding that could have changed everything. It is a luxury to be able to rail against your loneliness, one that would have killed her, but the loneliness is not less potent, especially with a Sith whispering in his ear. 

There is quiet for a moment and then the sound of scratching, something she can’t place or doesn’t recognize at all. It’s a peculiar sound, repetitive and almost calming if it weren’t so frantic. He’s muttering something under his breath, a mantra that she can’t make out.

And then she hears a crash, wood splintering and then the slamming of a door. She waits a moment assuring that the room is now empty before she grabs the ledge of the window and pulls herself up into the opening. She pauses there, squatted in the large window, and takes in the quarters. It’s different from Kylo Ren quarters, warmer, it's inhabitant not a child but also not fully grown.

There’s a bed for a teenage boy.

There are balls and wooden sticks in the corner and she wonders if he has friends that he plays with in the open air. 

There are even blocks, neatly organized in different boxes, and she wonders what he makes with those blocks, what kind of future he imagined if he had been given the choice to build it on his own. 

She walks over to the writing desk where she imagines that he does his lessons, and, what was once a chair, but was now a pile of sharp wooden shards. She wonders, at this point, how often his temper necessitated new furniture. She looks around for that piece of Ben, the piece of the tortured boy on the verge of what he is and what he is becoming. Her eyes fall on the desk, to the fine, wooden pens and a scrap of parchment. She quickly crosses the room. She takes a moment before taking the paper and runs her hands over the desk, the pens, the ink, all beautiful and earnest- all a part of Ben Solo. 

She is about to read what was scratched onto the parchment when she feels his familiar presence hedging into her thoughts. She snatches it up and runs toward the window. She jumps up again, catching the ledge, and drops soundlessly to the ground before he can see her. But she spares one look back into his room before disappearing into the night. He is standing, shoulders slumped, and head bent in front of the pile of wood chips that was once his chair. He exhales sharply and then, wordlessly, begins to sweep up his mess.

Before she is pulled away again, she looks down at the paper.

_Be with me. Be with me. Be with me. Be with me._

Over and over again.

And over and over again she breaks with Ben Solo, experiences his undoing in new and painful ways. She breaks for the young man who was calling out for someone, anyone. He should have been easy prey for the worst of predators, but even now, she can feel it.

That he was-is-fighting.

###

_“Concentrate, Ben…. Clear your mind of distraction, of emotion, of passion. Just be.”_

His uncle’s voice is loud and clear in his head, annoying and, itself, a distraction.

_“If you’re going to rule by my side, Ren. You can’t be defeated by heights.”_

Snoke’s voice is almost as loud as Luke’s and equally useless.

He breathes out, low and controlled, as he lifts his foot, placing it firmly on another ledge. Kid is clinging desperately to his neck, face buried in his neck and shaking so hard he thinks he can hear her bones rattling.

“Hey, Kid,” he says. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna fall.”

“How can you be sure?”

He snorts bitterly and shakes his head. “I’ve had a lot of practice climbing out of pits.”

His fingers dig into a hold on the wall. He pauses and takes a breath, drawing on all his training, from Luke, and from Snoke, to calm his quaking limbs and his burning shoulders.

“A little higher,” she says. “And there’s a ledge. We can take a break there and you can rest.”

He doesn’t look up to find it. Don’t look up, and don’t look down. Look at what’s right in front of your eyes. That’s the only way he’ll get out. That’s the only way he can get back to Rey. He hooks his toe into a small nob in the wall. It stays. He exhales again and gingerly pushes off his toe to reach for the next crevice. There’s a second where his blood freezes, where he wonders if he can die in Chaos? Clearly someone can be injured here; so what would happen when he plummeted to the ground.

Because he feels the nob break under his foot, and he’s not quite fast enough to grab hold of the ledge. Kid tightens her arms around his neck so hard he can’t breathe. He feels fear, for a fraction of a second, and then he let’s go; gives himself over to everything dark and strained and wounded inside of him; on instinct he goes there when he reaches out his hand toward the ledge again, pulling himself toward it. The power is blinding a, like a surge of electricity through his blood.

Intoxicating, strong and raw.

Then, just as quickly, he clamps a lid down on top of it. He knows what lay there, and what a swift fall it is. But, a fall he is willing to risk over the one that flattened him and Kid into jelly on the ground. It was enough to pull him back to the fact of the mountain.

He clings to the mountain for a moment, heaving, trying to regain control again. The Force is strong here, but darker than anything he has ever felt. When his head stops spinning and the last of the dark power surging inside of him flickers out, he looks over his shoulder at Kid, whose nails are digging into him.

“You okay back there,” he asks. She offers only a whimper in response. “That was a close one, Kid,” he says. “But we’re okay.” She mumbles something unintelligibly into his sweater. “We’re almost there," he assures with a nod. "Almost."

It doesn’t take him long to reach the ledge after that. It was like his body had been drained of power, only for it to be recharged in an instant. Helpful, but disconcerting. Kid doesn’t let go until they are both safely on the ledge. It’s big enough for him to scoot all the way back against the mountain, with his legs stretched out in front of him. She slides off his back and inches toward the ledge, looking over and straight down the long distance they had just climbed.

“Hey, stop that,” he barks, calling her away. “If you fall after I carried you halfway up this mountain, I’m gonna be so mad.” She looks over her shoulder, sheepishly, before looking over the edge one more time. “Fine,” he says, throwing his hands up in the air. “Fall then.”

She giggles and scurries back away from the ledge and flops down on the ground, wiggling around to find a comfortable spot for her.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Kid,” he says. “We’ll be up and climbing again in a little.”

She nods and stretches out her arms and legs. “Okay,” she says. “Just a little rest.”

She head-butts his arm. He ignores her the first time. And the second. It’s not until she does it a third time that he looks down at her, annoyed. “Yes,” he drawls out. “Can I help you with something.” She lets out an exasperated sigh and throws her hand in the air before grabbing his and holding it limply above her head so she can move closer and then drop his arm heavily over her shoulder.

He looks at her oddly for a moment, but he doesn't take his arm back. He remembers that. The way he wanted to cling to Snoke when he was scared and alone, Snoke only indulged it at first when he was young and stupid, long enough for his hook to sink in so deep that he couldn't remove it if he wanted to. “Next time use your words, Kid.”

She nods and sighs, contentedly. “I hope we find some food up there,” she whispers sleepily.

“We will,” he says. “As long as I don’t wake up to your gnawing at my fingers.”

She giggles childishly, which turns into one more long, loud yawn before her eyes slide shut and her breathing steadies to a rhythm of sleep. Ben should sleep too. He’s not sure if being jostled through dimensions counts as sleep. But the thought of sleeping, unattended on a ledge with all kinds of nasty creatures about in a Sith Hell makes him ill. So instead he closes his eyes and thinks of her.

He wonders what she is doing.

If she’s sleeping.

If she’s drinking enough water.

If she’s eating enough.

Is she…is she looking for him?

Part of him, selfishly hoped so, and another part hoped to God she wasn’t wasting her time. She had already crossed the galaxy to bring her back. He had already asked her to join him twice, always expecting her to make the move- either to kill him or join him.

This was his journey now. His work to do. But some part of him, something that Rey had, with her relentless faith in him, pulled from his soul- some sense of worth and belonging- made him think that maybe she was looking for him too, keenly aware that the bond was strained to the point of hurting, but not yet borken.

Maybe she would cross the galaxy one more time.

He hopes it is just one more time. He swallows hard and clenches his jaw, feeling the sting of unwelcome tears on the back of his eyes, his soul aching with her absence. From the moment he crossed into her mind, and she into his, he has not felt her in some way. And, it would seem, even before then they belonged to each other.

And being without her now is like an open, bleeding wound. He can numb it and ignore it, but lifeblood is still pouring from him.

Is she looking for him?

Is she thinking of him?

_Of course, she isn’t, you fool._

He ignores the voice at first, no different from the voices that have lived inside his head for so long- dripping with hate and self- doubt.

_She hasn’t given you one thought since you gave your life up for her._

He opens his eyes this time. That is not his voice- it’s not Snoke, or Palpatine, or Darth Vader or his own. He looks down at Kid who is sleeping soundly and then up at the crackling clouds above him.

_You can’t see me, Kylo Ren. Because I’m already inside of you. We are brothers you and I, connected by the dark._

Ben closes his eyes again, trying to block out the voice, trying to breathe his way past it.

_You can’t escape me, Kylo Ren._

“That’s not my name,” he growls, he’s not sure if he whispers it or thinks it.

_Of course it is._

Ben jumps, feeling a soft tendril brush up against his mind; not so unlike the way Snoke would speak to him as a child.

“Leave,” he demands. “Leave now.”

 _I said I am part of you_ , purrs the voice. _You opened yourself up to the dark side again and then you were easy to find._ _Come and face me, if you are truly unafraid._

“Yeah, that’s going to be a negative from me,” scoffs Ben. “I have things to do and…”

A stab of pain jolts through his body, as though someone had driven a Force Pike directly into his brain. His body shudders and jerks, and he feels himself flickering between one plane of consciousness and into the next- one inside himself, one empty and dark.

_Your soul is filled with darkness, Kylo Ren, and it feeds me. Your anger. Your fear. All of it feeds me._

Thick, red tendrils of vapor and smoke curl around his legs and wrists. He jerks away and backs off. He isn’t on the ledge anymore. He is somewhere else, somewhere much more familiar to him. Somewhere even more horrifying.

The tentacles once again reach out toward him, but he stomps away, just out of reach.

“No,” he says. “I know what you are.”

_Then you know that I show only the truth._

“I know you’re a coward,” he spits. “Who needs to prey on the fears of children to feed.”

It laughs, a chilling laugh that quickens his heartbeat.

_Apt phrasing, Kylo Ren._

_“I told you,”_ he growls, his hands forming quaking fists, the Solo in him wanting to punch, futility, at the effervescent red gathering around him. “…that is not my name.”

It scoffs, cruel and biting.

 _To the galaxy, that's exactly who you are. It's who you will always be. You did too much in the name of Kylo Ren to escape his clutches now. You will forever be Kylo Ren, to the galaxy and…_ The fog fades and he sees shapes in the distance. He steps closer, trying to make them out. People. Not just people _…to her._

“R..rey…” it’s a trembling whisper, caught between disbelief and a fear that if he should speak her name, she would disappear out of existence in this moment.

_Yes…Do you see now? Do you see how she does not weep for you?_

He watches transfixed with her, as she guides his lifeless body to the ground.

_Do you see how she feels nothing?_

He sees nothing… just her.

_Do you see how she runs to her true family?_

He sees her smile, through tears and shock, relief, and grief. She looks...shattered. He feels himself trembling, overwrought with the sight of her.

_Yes. Give yourself over to the truth. She does not share your story; she has already forgotten you. You will only be remembered as Kylo Ren. You will die as you lived; unloved, forgotten, and cast off._

He can feel the Force here too; wherever he is, both light and dark- unlike in Chaos where only one seems to thrive. Both rest in this strange, familiar place. 

And then, suddenly, he knows. He knows where he is. He knows where this smoke demon has infiltrated, where it thinks it has staked its claim. 

And here, he realizes, he has complete control now.

Not Luke.

Not Snoke.

Not Palpatine. 

Not this ridiculous smoke demon.

Him.

“You’re wrong,” he whispers, a smirk and a laugh in his voice. “You think I care what the galaxy thinks of me.” He laughs again, the smoke retreats and the vision before him blurs and morphs into the darkness. He can sense it behind him, taking solid shape, broiling with a hungry rage. “She knows.” He says with a nod. “Even if she’s the only one.”

“And this…” he waves to the image of Rey, of her in the arms of people who love her, held as she cries. He does not know for certain that it is for him, or for the galaxy, for herself, or because she is just so damn tired. But it doesn’t matter. “…This…is _not_ my worst fear.”

He opens his hands and holds out his palms. This is a place he knows well. He knows the intricacies, where the weapons are hidden and where the darkness lives and breathes.

“I’ve already seen my worst fear,” he says calmly. The two men fade out until there is just Rey. She's alive, not limp and grey in his arms. Alive. “My worst fear happened already, and guess what..." He turns as the creature forms and takes solid shape in front of him- large and looming with gnashing fangs and glinting claws. Ben holds out his hand and calls on it, because, in this place, he makes the rules, he creates the reality here. He’s not going to be manipulated, not again. The creature, the demon, roars- unfed and wrathful, and charges him. "I defeated it already."

He is in control here, and it will never be subjected to another being again. The creature grows closer, but Ben holds his ground until he feels it, the heavy hilt in his hand, the blade, his blade, the violent red faded to orange. The demon’s eyes are blazing ready for a fight. But it is a short one. It roars as his saber lances through its chest, and just as quickly as the fight is over, the creature turns into smoke around his blade. The red vapor blackens and then turns to dust.

When Ben looks back up, Rey is completely gone, and he regrets that he didn’t take more time to look at her, even as a specter.

He regrets that he never knew how to tell her…anything.

He regrets that he never spoke to her as Ben.

“Ben!”

He spins around in the darkness again, this time it’s a familiar voice calling his name.

“Hey! Ben Solo! Wake up!”

Wake up.

He looks down at his hand and the saber is gone, its job is done, for now.

“Hey tallboy, wake up!”

He feels sick, like he’s spinning, or being jostled and shaken about.

“Wake up now!” The voice is becoming more frantic and pitched with fear.

“Fine,” he mutters. “Fine…fine…”

He can feel sensation coming back to his limbs, the tingling as he grows, filling his own body again, instead of shrinking, hidden inside of it.

When his eyes open he is met with the still-darkening sky and the Kid, staring down at him, panic-stricken for a moment and then awash with relief.

“Don’t scare me like that,” she says, hitting him on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he protests. He moves to sit up, but she pushes him back down. “Why are you so bossy, huh?”

Kid glares at him. “It was a smoke demon,” she says. “I can tell! You went all pale and rigid and cold, and then you feel on me, and that hurt!”

Ben raises an eyebrow and sits up again, this time slower. “Yeah so sorry,” he says. “I was busy…” she crosses her arms and glares at him. “…fighting a demon…” she wrinkles her nose. “…you know that preys on your worst fears.”

She huffs. “Yeah what would have happened if you had lost,” she says. “I would have been stranded on this ledge and you said you’d get me back to my mother!”

“And I will,” he says, standing up and stretching out his back. Kid stands to and mimics his motion of swinging her arms and rolling her neck.

“How did you beat it anyway,” asks Kid. “The demon?”

“How did you,” he asks.

She shrugs. “I didn’t,” she says. “My momma did. My worst fear was that I couldn’t get back to her, and she told me it was okay to be afraid, and she just…held me until I wasn’t afraid anymore.”

Ben straightens out, unrolling his spin and working out the kinks and aches from being propped up against a rock.

“Good a way as any to kill a Sith Demon,” he says. “I went with something a little less subtle.”

She laughs and shrugs. “More than one way to skin a smoke demon.”

Ben looks back up the mountain, still looming but, perhaps, not as high up any longer as he had imagined, a short rest offering some perspective on it.

“You ready,” he says, squatting back down beside her. She nods and swings her arms around his neck and tightens her grip.

“Yip, yip,” she says, a playful laugh in her voice and a light kick. Ben looks over his shoulder and glares at her.

“Keep that up and I’m gonna make you carry me up the mountain.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “You’re far too big, and I am much too small.”

“Says you,” he snorts, as he feels along the face of the mountain until he finds a good place to start. “I’m a dainty little flower.”

She laughs again, this time more raucous and louder, throwing her head back as if he had made the funniest joke in the world. She deserves a good laugh. 


	7. Break this for You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey visits Ben on the night the temple is destroyed. Kid finally gets to eat, and Ben gets to laugh.

She is another Rey now- another Rey in the line of infinite Reys- each one containing the whole over her existence- her fears, her memories, her joys, and her wounds. This one steps through the shroud of shimmering mist into a place that she recognizes; a memory that lingered so close to the surface of Ben’s consciousness that it’s all but burned into her brain.

She had seen it in his deepest fears when she pressed into his mind, something happened here, something that changed everything. She is outside of a small hut, cloaked in darkness. It’s the center point, a convergence of moments of weakness, pain, fear, and desperation.

Years are about to become undone in mere seconds.

She waits outside the hut. Her heart pounding. She does not want to see it; she doesn’t want to see any of it. She doesn’t want to see Luke ignite his saber over his nephew, and she can’t bear seeing Ben destroy the temple, murder the students, and disappear into the night.

She doesn’t want any of it.

And it takes everything in her power not to intercede when she hears Luke approach the hut. She can feel the conflict coming from him. She can feel the fear and self-loathing. And while painful, she understands him more in this moment. None of this was what he wanted either, and she believes that, given the chance to change things, Luke would.

He loves his nephew. She can feel that too, even in the midst of his fear. She clings to that when she feels Ben, and even though he is a man now, she doubles over and holds herself when his fear breaks through his sleep. He’s a man but it feels like the nightmare of a child.

It’s the sound of breaking.

The sound of a million lies and worst fears validated.

She wants to fix it, to make herself known, to tell them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That no one's choice has been made.

But she doesn’t.

She’s not here to change the past, she’s here to claim it-so that the future may be redeemed for all of them. But in that moment, she hates it.

The hut caves in on itself, crushing her and crushing them. She backs away as it falls, out of sight and out the way, hiding in the dark. She waits, trusting that it will become clear what it’s time- trusting that whatever piece of Ben Solo that is about to be broken and cast off will make itself apparent.

As the rubble and debris begin to shift, wood collapses in, filling the spaces opened in the shuffling beneath it. Ben emerges first. Rey does not worry about Luke in that moment, not physically anyway. She knows he is alive though. She knows that. But she knows that neither of them will emerge the same, neither will leave this moment unscathed.

Ben does not pull himself out of the wreckage, instead, it’s Kylo Ren who climbs out of this pit. It’s Kylo Ren’s silhouette set again the night, the temple, and the crackling, reddening sky above it. He staggers forward, his body swaying as it heaves with emotion.

“Why,” he screams, his voice beseeching. “Why did you do this?” An inquiry to himself, to Luke, to the Force, to the darkness hatching inside of him. She knows what happens now as he faces the temple. His lightsaber wielded, pointing at it accusingly.

_“When I came to, the temple was burning. He had vanished with a handful of my students and slaughtered the rest.”_

She doesn’t want to watch. She doesn’t want to hold the whole of his story, all of its tragedy and darkness. To face it would mean facing something else, something swimming in her own blood, something buried and ignored.

She is about to look away when she hears him scream again as he moves toward the temple, the begging why. She is about to turn away when she smells it, and her blood freezes. She can sense it in the air, not some nameless, amorphous darkness that no one thought to look for. She looks out above the temple, at the gathering storm and rage. She can feel him, his power gathering around them and inside young Ben Solo.

And another piece of the story, unknown by the galaxy, falls into place.

He doesn’t do this. The lightening ascends from the sky and strikes the temple, setting it ablaze. She covers her own mouth to keep from screaming. She thinks for a moment that she fails when she hears Ben’s scream of protest as he is thrown back. He scrambles to his feet and runs back toward the temple.

“No,” he yells. He had been teetering on the edge of self-loathing, and she can feel him in that moment. He thinks he did it.

He knows he did it.

Because he’s only capable of destroying.

She wants to reach out, to tell him it’s not true; to tell him who is pulling the strings, to soothe a hand over his fears that he is a monster, and she burns with anger for Palpatine.

Not the Jedi way. Maybe. But she burns all the same. Because he knows what he is doing; he knows the state of Ben Solo’s heart and how ready he is to see evil in himself, and he descends easily into it. He has already begun to see himself as Kylo Ren.

When the students come, three of them, they are filled with fear; a fear that Rey can’t help but wonder wasn’t already present in them, waiting for the right moment to justify it, to justify their fear of the grandson of Vader.

Rey is sure, here is the place where he fully steps into Kylo Ren. He did not burn the temple; he did not kill the students. But these students as they draw their sabers on him are bringing about their own death.

But she sees Ben turn his back to them. She hears him tell them, almost calmly, that he is leaving, that he doesn’t want to fight them, that he has no desire to hurt them, certain, and Rey is too, that their numbers will make little difference in a fight.

He tries to leave, and they won’t let him.

They deny what he says has happened, dismiss it.

She can feel every one of Snoke’s, of Palpatine's, lies suddenly become confirmed in his mind.

_They don’t trust you._

_They won’t believe you._

_You need to run, my young friend._

And what is most tragic, what makes Rey rage against the Force and the cruelty of the universe, is that she doesn’t know that Snoke is wrong in this case. They _don’t_ trust him. They _don’t_ believe him. He _should_ run.

“Just get out of my way,” he orders. “I won’t be responsible for what happens if you force me to fight you.”

She sees their sabers ignite, itching for a fight. Ben for his part, doesn’t bother even unclipping his saber. He doesn’t need it to defeat them, he’s far more afraid of himself then he is of them. The first student, a woman, leaps toward him, her saber raised. Rey can hear the sound of her teeth grinding together. She keeps waiting, waiting for the dam to break and for his darkness to take over, for the moment he becomes Kylo Ren.

But even now, he merely freezes her and flicks her back into her friends. No death, no vengeance, and she finds herself more willing to attack them than Ben seems to be. She faced off with Luke after finding out, she, like Ben, has little to fear from these students.

But she does what she’s good at, she waits.

“I’m giving you a chance,” she hears Ben say again to the group of three, their fear stoked with every second. “I just want to go.” Their stances widen, they make ready to attack. This is the moment, Rey thinks. The moment he turns, the moment he breaks, the moment he commits the atrocities the galaxy has long laid on his shoulders. “Last chance.” There is a chilling warning in his voice.

Rey wonders that he hasn’t reached to unclip his lightsaber. Instead, he makes weapons out of the rocks and rubble and remains of the temple, the remains of his old life, a mess that is not only his making but he will be blamed for. He flings the bits at his attackers.

They scream, a few are hit. And yet…none have died. And no one can think that that is possible aside from Ben purposely choosing to leave them alive.

And he leaves.

Rey lingers for a moment as the students tend to each other, as the temple burns, as Luke remains buried beneath in the hut. He will wake soon to find all his students gone, and it will break his heart. But there is nothing to be done now.

Rey slinks into the night, keeping her distance as Ben escapes into the night, alone.

###

“Yuck,” says Ben, shaking his head as he swallows the bit of charred rat.

Kid laughs and kicks her feet into the ground. “No, it’s delicious!”

She turns the spit with the other rat over their meager fire. It turns out that it’s fairly easy to start a fire in Sith Hell but finding something edible was another matter. Kid had made it an impressive distance before needing to be carried. But when she was clearly beginning to become faint, Ben was reminded of his promise that they would find food. So he stopped and let her rest while he attempted to find anything in this hellscape worth eating.

Rats.

At least they could always be counted on.

He would rather keep moving. He had disciplined his body, gone to incredible and unhealthy lengths to train himself not to need food beyond what a normal body should be able to handle. He admitted that water was another thing altogether.

“There’s water at the citadel,” she says. “There’s also a bog but…” she stops and looks back at the spinning rat.

“But…”

“The water is a little muddy,” she says.

“Well you know,” he says. “Better a little mud than death, right?”

“Weeeell,” she says. “There also may be a leviathan there.”

“Oh says,” Ben, taking another bite of his piece of rat before handing it over to Kid. She hesitates for a moment, as though he may snatch it back.

“That’s enough rat for me,” he says. ‘Trying to cut back.”

Kid nods and tears into it with her tiny teeth.

Ben looks again at her ankle, the wrap was already soaked in blood and puss. He thinks again of healing it, and then he remembers the short moment on the mountain, the flood of darkness that came into him. Healing is inherently of the Light, and there is only dark in this place.

He reaches down and feels the metal around her ankle, and tugs lightly.

“It doesn’t come off,” she says, through a mouthful of food. “We’ve tried, but it’s connected to the Master.”

“I know,” he says. He slowly peels off the wrap under the cuff. She flinches as it comes up, grudgingly from her skin, but she doesn’t lash out this time. “Is there any way you can be set free?”

She shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

He rips off a piece of his sleeve where the fabric is already frayed and ripped. His poor sweater was taking a beating. If he made it out of here he would keep this sweater forever, a memento of his trip to hell.

He begins to rewrap her ankle. It’s a longer strip of fabric now, creating more cushion between her twig-like ankle and the metal.

“I wish I could break this for you, Kid,” he says. He means it, deeply. “I wish I could break it and take you out of here with me.”

She laughs as if it’s a silly thought. “I didn’t know there was an out of here,” she says.

“There is. There are planets filled with water, and plants. There’s a sky filled with stars…”

“What are stars,” she asks, forgetting for the first time about her food and leaning forward as he tucks the end of the strip into itself and smooths out beneath the cuff.

“There are tiny, beautiful lights that live in the sky.”

She looks up and scrunches her nose. “Our sky has no stars.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, it doesn’t.”

“And what else,” she asks. “Do you have good food?’

“The best,” he says. “Cooked meat, berries, pudding, sweet bread.”

Her eye widens and her smile grows. “That sounds AMAZING!”

He laughs and gives her knee a little pat so she knows he’s done. She holds her leg out so she can examine her ankle. “Thank you, Ben.”

She drops her leg and looks up at the sky, as though pondering something for a moment. “I wish you could break it too, Ben,” she says. “But…I couldn’t leave.” He doesn’t say anything, just looks at her. He wonders if he should have even brought it up. He knows nothing of Sith Hell, nothing of the Force here, but he can’t imagine that she deserves to be here, but he can’t imagine there is anything he can do about it. It’s possible to leave, but she…she was born here or created, or…whatever she was. She hakes her head. “I can’t leave because well…I could never leave my momma.”

Ben snorts and looks at her, as though she had said something ridiculous. “You think I’d take you and leave your mother?” She smiles, softly. She knows what he knows, that there is little chance of either of them getting out of here, but that smile tells him that it means something. “Come on, Kid,” he says. “I’m not a monster."

“You are a monster,” she shouts, all giggles and mock accusation. “You dragged me up a mountain!”

“Yup,” he says, spinning the second rat around again over the fire. “You’re right. I’m a monster.”

“It’s okay,” she says, baring her teeth at him and squinting her eye at him menacingly. “I’m a monster too! We can be monsters together.”

Ben wonders what it means that he’s laughed more in Sith Hell than he has in the past ten years.

###

Rey keeps her distance, but she doesn’t want to lose him or give herself away. She’s worried at first that he will sense her, but there is too much crowding at the forefront of his mind. His own roaring emotions, and that specter that lives their always, whispering in his ear.

When he makes it to his ship. Rey begins to panic. Had she missed the token from this place? Was she meant to get on the ship with him, because she very much doubted that she would be able to keep her presence secret for long. Perhaps it was back at the hut? She considers turning and running, but something keeps her rooted there, something tells her to wait. Ben stops at the edge of the ramp and looks up at the ship.

She knows where he is going, the open, grasping arms that are waiting for him.

He stops and takes his saber in his hand. He ignites it, briefly, and he’s bathed in blue. It’s a saber of the light, of the healed, and of the whole. He screams, angry and feral before he turns and throws it just beyond the ship and into the dirt before disappearing up the ramp. Rey waits until he is out of sight and hurries toward the saber. She picks it up and dusts off the dirt.

It’s weighted and wide, suited for Ben’s hands. She thinks of the boy who carefully crafted it and she wonders if he was excited, if he looked expectantly at Luke as he examined it, if he beamed with pride when Luke gave a nod approval and ruffled his hair.

There is so much more of Ben that she wishes to see.

One day.

She ignites the saber just for a moment.

She breaks again for Ben Solo. She had expected to see the rise of Kylo Ren tonight, his fall into the dark, the story the galaxy whispered in dark places. But he is leaving, still Ben Solo, still at war with himself, still fighting powerful darkness that he can’t give name too.

Ben Solo walked away. Ben Solo refused to kill his fellow students. There is still so much of his story untold and unheard. She breaks for the man whose legacy was so much more than Vader, but still is Vader, and what could have been had both been offered to him without shame and without deception.

“Hey!”

Rey looks up, without thinking, the saber is alight and shining clearly on her face in the night.

Ben is standing on the ramp again, perhaps he heard her, or saw her, or felt her. However, he knew it didn’t matter now.

“What are you…”

She turns the saber off and turns without a word, sprinting as fast as her legs will take her.

“Come back,” he yells. “Come back you dirty, scavenging thief!”

He may be following her, she’s not sure. But a few more steps take her back into the shadowy veil, into the cool mist of the in-between, beyond Ben’s reach.

She hopes she hasn’t done anything that irreparably changes the course of history, but she is fairly certain that she has not.

Because her last memory before she is taken to the next place and time is of a frozen forest, a first fight between equals, the way the saber came to her and how he looked at her in awe and disbelief, and those words he whispered into the night when she ignited the blue blade.

_“It is you.”_


	8. The Stories Held

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey learns more of the story of Anakin and the women who made him. Ben faces his own darkness, still very much alive.

Somehow, like last time, Rey could feel that it was leading somewhere and that soon she would make it to the end. She would not carry the whole of Ben Solo, but they are all pieces of him, bits of a broken and scattered soul, some jagged edges but ready to be brought back together.

She makes another stop, this one much closer than any of the others, this one feels so close to the her who watched Ben Solo disappear, the familiar and bright, the preserved relics, the shattered pedestal scattered across the harsh white floor. 

His quarters.

He had known where she was.

He always knows.

She wonders if he knows that she is looking for him as hard as he ever looked for her. He’s alive, she believes that, but she is afraid that every day that he is absent the bond grows a bit more strained and weak, as if being stretched across time and space will break it soon.

She looks down at the warped and disfigured mask of Darth Vader. She kneels down and reaches for it, her fingers inches from the black surface, but she hesitates. She can feel so much in it, so much history. It holds so much meaning and darkness and conflict and hate. It was a prison, a cage, for both Vader and for Ben. She swallows hard and closes the gap between it and her fingers. This time she does not pull away in fear as she did with the dagger. She wants to see, needs to see, the story held inside of this helmet.

To understand Ben, she needs to see the whole story, the story of the Skywalkers, which is, for better and worse, the story of Vader.

The story of Anakin.

It’s the first thing she hears, a name unknown to her until this moment, but the voice saying it carries the love of a mother. She sees a little boy in a desert, all kindness and love and open-heartedness, a boy whose future was decided before him with the turn of a prophecy.

She sees him, cling to his mother with love.

She sees her push him away, with love- toward something she believes and hope will be better than anything she can offer to him as a slave on a desert planet.

Schmi.

She hears the name echoing in the recesses of the helmet, her reach in this story beyond comprehension.

The first Skywalker.

The story begins with her, and Rey wonders how that has become lost in history, with no one to speak of her. She wonders that she could be left behind in the story when she has shaped so much of it.

Rey sees Anakin, frightened and cold and alone, reaching out for someone, anyone, and even those who love him seem to hold him at a distance. There is anger in him, fear in him, a darkness and a light, and it’s all so familiar. In Luke. In Ben.

In her.

So human, and yet, so maligned.

And suddenly there is a light, blinding and bright and warm, it beats like a heart, thrumming with life, at its center is another woman. She is brave, and she stands, over and over again, for the people she loves, for the galaxy she loves. She holds the fate and the weight of so many. She looks at the man, at Anakin, as though she sees the whole of him, and Anakin looks at her as though there was no one else, as though there could never be anyone else.

“Padme…” Anakin says it like it is the culmination of all that is good and beautiful in the universe. He clings to it as though it keeps him anchored in his own existence. 

Another name she has never heard, another name somehow lost in the Skywalker history. Schmi. Padme. Even Anakin. The whole story of who they are hidden and locked away. But they loved each other. Anakin loved her deeply.

She watches as the galaxy’s greatest evil takes the boy, the man, and seeps into him like a poison, dangling his worst fears and his greatest love before his eyes with empty, wicked promises. Rey sees as that love narrows, tightens like a coil around his own neck, as it darkens and twists into something too much like obsession, possession, and insecurity. But Padme continues to speak the truth of what is inside him, compassion, love, and goodness.

She knows it's still there.

Even unto death, Padme knows that it is still there. She knows that great love, the same great love that made him so vulnerable, will one day be the thing that saves him.

Rey sees a man turned machine, diseased with regret. She sees a machine haunted by the memories belonging to the man- some part of him always trying to get back to her. Some part of him, well-kept from his Master, longing for her. 

" _My son is with them…I have felt him.”_

She sees Anakin stir awake, nudged slowly back to life, his soul reaching out to his son. 

_“Strange that I have not," a voice answers back._

That voice, filled with pride and venom, blind to his own folly, unable to plan for something so unpredictable as love. Rey bears witness as that goodness that Padme believed in to her dying breath awakened to save the son of Anakin Skywalker, to save Anakin Skywalker himself.

And she is overwhelmed because the legacy of Vader should not have been preserved more diligently than the legacy of Anakin, separated over and over again from the women who loved him so tenaciously. What if both had been offered to the universe, to Ben.

How would Schmi have changed the story? How would Padme have changed the story? 

Because they are part of this mask, laced into its being, and while it still represents so much terror, Rey is also filled with compassion for the man trapped inside of it. She imagines what Padme would do in the face of this mask, what Anakin’s mother would do.

She breaks the mask, not in anger or rage or fear, but in the hopes that it makes way for something to be set free, for something to be set right. She picks up one black, jagged piece, for it too is a piece of Ben Solo, a piece of his soul lays here, in his grandfather, his grandmother, and his great-grandmother. Their love belongs to him too.

She brushes her fingers over the sharp edges before she puts it in her pocket, casting one more look at the shattered helmet.

If she succeeds, if she brings him back, she will tell him their story too.

###

So far, it seems that Sith Hell is more unpleasant than dangerous. Ben keeps looking, scanning the horizon for some sign of what this place is, how it came to be, what makes it tick, and why the dark side of the Force is allowed to run so amuck here. This place seems to be created and formed from the dark side, but is fashioned to be a punishment for Dark Siders, and while vengeance and punitive punishment are the way of the dark side more than the light, something feels off. The darkness seems to be ever-growing, feeding on itself, and creating more.

But it’s still just a feeling.

Because, aside from the mountain and the smoke demon, it’s just dry and dead, an endless wasteland. Nothing he hasn’t born in his training with Snoke.

Kid had been telling him about her mother and her friends before she started stumbling and tripping, the energy from the rat beginning to wear off. Though she didn’t seem to be thirsty yet, he wondered if that was an adaptation to living so long in this place. Ben, for his part, knew they would have to find a water source soon.

“Not everyone has mothers,” she had said. “But I am special, there aren’t a lot of us.”

“A lot of what?”

“Small ones,” she had answered as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “My momma says I was a gift from the Master. The Master never gives gifts but she did once! It was us, the small ones.”

It was an odd way to phrase it. It didn’t sound as if they were birthed in the same way that other living beings were. But she had very little knowledge to offer and preferred to talk to him about her favorite game with the other small ones where they all attempted to balance a stone on their heads while they attempted to knock off the others stone with sticks.

When she started to stumble, he pulled her up into his arms.

“Just keep walking straight,” she said. “We’ll pass the bog soon.”

“The Leviathan bog?”

She nodded, her eye dropping shut.

“Filled with Leviathan and mud?”

She snorted. “Yup, that you’re going to drink…blah!” She stuck her tongue out and shook her head before it dropped lazily on his shoulder lazily and soon fell asleep.

It is not the most convenient way to travel by any means, but he wasn’t ready to stop yet. And somehow, getting Kid back to her mother seems just as important as getting to the gate. He thinks of Rey, and the loneliness of separation that she carried for so long, may still be carrying. She didn’t have the option to be returned to her parents, it was never a possibility, but for Kid, there is a chance for Kid, and she deserves that.

Well, she and her mother deserve to be free, but he’s not so sure that option is even on the table or what would happen if he tried. That is not why he came here. He came here to get back to Rey, to get a second chance to make things right for her, not to topple the hierarchy of Sith Hell. But all the same, the thought of leaving her behind, trapped in whatever this place is, begins to nag at him like a toothache, one that he has no idea how to get rid of.

He covers more ground, but it all seems to be the same ground, making any gauge of distance impossible, as he’s certain he’s seen the same jagged rocks and same red sand dunes several times over. It isn’t until he finally sees the black, surface of the bog ahead of him that he is sure he’s still making any forward movement and not just wandering surface.

He gently sets Kid down on the ground a safe distance from the water. She does not wake but curls up tighter into a ball apparently more than accustomed to tumultuous sleep. The bog looks calm enough, the surface of the water steady, and he’s certain gathering its own bacteria and illnesses. But he’s dead, after all, sort of? What could it do to his body that has not already happened a million times over. He kneels at the edge of the bog and cups his hand into the water, it’s warm but not hot, but, like everything else here, it looks dead.

Most dead planets he has visited had no sign of water. This water even feels different in his hand, almost heavy. It looks clean enough but it tastes stale and dry, as though whatever makes waters vibrant and fresh is somehow missing from it. It sits oddly in his mouth before he swallows. It’s not refreshing or healing, but he hopes his body can’t tell the difference as he takes another gulp from his cupped hands.

He looks down at himself in the surface of the dark water, and even though it is not clear, he can still see himself, and it feels like the first time in a lifetime. He realizes that he’s never seen this man's face before. He remembers Ben Solo’s face, and Kylo Ren’s face, but the face of the man who's been both, it’s different.

He looks younger, somehow. More open and whole than has ever remembered being. His whole being doesn’t shake with frantic worry, or uncertainty, a desperate clambering for something. He remembers Ben Solo, before Kylo Ren, and he didn’t look like this either.

He takes another gulp of water, it feels only slightly better than swallowing sand, but he doesn’t know when he’ll have another chance. He looks out at the surface of the water. It’s still calm and still, no sign of a monster or anything else.

He goes to dip his hand one more time when he hears the scream.

Kid.

He instinctively reaches for his saber and swears when there’s nothing there. He turns on his knees to see Kid, screaming, writhing and wiggling, held tightly in a long, coiled tentacle, attached to a hulking, horned monster with a wide gaping mouth, lined with teeth, each one bigger than Kid’s whole body.

“Bennn,” she screams. “Ben, help me!”

He sprints toward the creature, reaching down and grabbing a sharp rock. Stupid? Maybe. But he had also stupidly chucked his saber into the ocean before going off to face the greatest evil in the galaxy. He should stop to consider that last time it got him killed, but there’s no time for that.

Instead, he screams at the monster, drawing its attention toward him, a much bigger snack, though still hardly filling for a creature its size. He locks in on one of the four, glowing red eyes and threw the rock at it. The creature roars as the rock slams into its eye but it holds tight to Kid and lashes out at Ben with one of its other tentacles, but he easily swerves to miss it before grabbing hold of it.

He isn’t sure what his plan is next as it whips it’s tentacle around, trying to shake him loose. But he had fought bigger monsters than this, beheaded bigger monsters than this…with a lightsaber, he reminds himself. The creature shakes him violently, trying to dislodge him like a pesky irritant, but he holds tight to the appendage, trying to get closer to Kid. It whips its tentacles out and Ben feels his bones jostle violently inside his body.

“What are you doing,” shrieks Kid, from the other side of the monster.

“Saving you,” he yells back. The Leviathan, mighty but not intelligent, moves its tentacle toward its mouth. Ben pulls himself up so he’s straddling the tentacle, and then stands shakily as the creature aims for its gaping maw. He is inches from its teeth when he jumps up, grabbing hold of the another tentacle waving above its head, catching the other appendage in its own teeth. It screams in pain as it pulls its tentacle out, now holding on by strips of tendons and broken skin. Ben pulls himself up and climbs it like a pillar toward the end where Kid is still clasped. She’s punching valiantly at her suctiony restraint but to no avail.

“Come on,” he calls, reaching out one hand toward her and using the other to balance. Kid reaches out toward him, her fingers almost touching his when the creature begins galloping toward the water, the sudden movement sends Ben flying. Kid’s scream is abruptly cut off as she is dragged beneath the surface of the bog.

Ben feels the hot, familiar anger rising up in him, the beginning of self-loathing and rage at his own uselessness. He tries to control his breath, but it comes out increasingly jagged and labored. He can feel it, seeping through the cracks, fueling him.

But he doesn’t shut it out, not this time. He needs it right now. He needs the Force, dark or light. He needs it if he wants to save Kid. He opens himself to the place further, allowing the energy here to fill him, steadied and controlled.

He can’t be afraid of it. It’s the only way to make sure he doesn’t submit to it. He’s running toward the lake with abandon, every step he draws Force energy from the dead earth of his place. He throws himself into the bog, and he can feel it there too, thriving beneath the surface. He pushes through the water. He can sense the Leviathan, and it too is made of the Force, strong and pulsing with the dark side. It fills him in fresh powerful waves.

He sees the creature at the bottom of the lake, still holding to Kid. She’s awake and thrashing in a panic, her mouth shut tight. He plants his feet forcibly on the bottom of the blog, keeping himself there as he wades through the water toward the creature. It turns toward him and howls into the water, creating wave strong enough to blow him back, but he roots himself in the swampy mud.

He closes his eyes and quiets his mind, sensing for what is around him.

Rocks.

Pieces of a crumbled mountain that may have once stood there thousands of years ago.

Bones of creatures long dead.

He calls on them all, raising them from the watery grave. He grits his teeth and seethes, trying to focus while also keeping the darkness from consuming him entirely. It’s at his mind, begging for entrance, desperate to flood his mind and fill it fully.

He strains against himself as he raises his weapons. The Leviathan is confident, he can sense that; certain that on this playing field, it has the upper hand. He waits, hiding his weapons in the dark water from the focus of the creature.

As it advances, he can see that Kid has gone limp in its grasp. There isn’t much time left so he moves toward the creature, his arsenal behind him. When he is close enough, sure enough that he will miss Kid, they shoot forward like torpedoes. Into the creature, through the creature, slicing through its appendages, piercing its eyeballs and soft underbelly. It’s a barrage of bone and rock and anything that lays at the bottom of the bog.

The Leviathan in its scramble to escape drops Kid. Ben reaches out and calls her toward him as he begins swimming toward the surface. As he kicks to the surface, holding her tight, he begins to close the gate again, pushing back the darkness, slamming shut the part of himself that he opened.

When he breaks the surface of the water, Kid hangs limply over his forearm as he kicks toward the shore. She is alive, he can sense that with what’s still left of the Force energy thrumming inside of him. He heaves them both onto the shore and kicks quickly at the muddy edge. He isn’t sure if the Leviathan survived, or is too wounded to follow him, but he hopes so.

He drags her into the dry dirt, caking to both of their bodies, and flops her onto her back. He presses his ear to her mouth, she’s not breathing.

“Alright, Kid,” he says. “Come one.”

He closes his eyes and focuses all of his energy all of his intention on her. He holds out his hand and guides the water out of her lungs, out of her throat, and out her mouth. There’s so much for her little body, but she isn’t dead, not yet. It’s delicate work, he has to move slow enough so as not to break anything inside of her body.

When the water is out, she lays still for a while.

“Come on, Kid,” he whispers. “Come on just breathe for me, okay.”

He doesn’t think he can bare holding another dead body, not again. And then her body arches up and she hacks up the little remaining water until she can take deep, gasping breathes of air. She thrashes roughly, still in shock and panic, clawing at the ground and screaming.

“Hey Kid,” he says, taking her gently by the shoulders. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

She stops for a moment and looks around wildly as if trying to place herself, her mind not yet catching up to the fact that she is okay and alive. And then just as suddenly as the panic left, it returned. She screams again and throws herself back and away from Ben. She kicks at the dirt to push herself away from him.

“Kid, what’s wrong,” he tries to move closer to her but she lets out a screech of panic, stopping him in his tracks. He holds out his hands, showing her his palms again. “Kid it’s me. I’m…”

She snarls at him and points at him, filled with venom and accusation. “You…you lied,” she screams. “You’re just like the Master!” She stands and steps shakily away from him. “Like the Spirits who serve the Master, like the pictures on the walls of the Citadel you’re…you’re like them!”

“Kid, I don’t know what you’re…”

“Your eyes,” she wails, long and wild like she had been betrayed most horribly. “Your eyes!”

Ben takes a shaky breath and slowly drags himself back to the surface of the water. If the Leviathan hasn’t pursued them yet, it’s likely either dead or licking its wounds. He peers down at his reflection. He doesn’t need too, really. When Kid told him what was so horrifying, it didn’t take long to put it together. But he wanted to look all the same.

This place was strong with the dark side and apparently more than just the dark side, but with the Sith. His eyes are a dull glowing yellow, already beginning to flicker out and fade back into brown as the last vestiges of the Force leave him, as the last crack he left open closes in his mind.

He closes his eyes tight and when he opens them, they are back to normal. He stands, slowly and turns back to Kid. She has yet to run, but she is looking at him, filled with fear.

“Look,” he says, softly, not stepping closer to her. “I know that that was scary for you, but I’m not like the Spirits and I’m not like the Master. I promise.”

“Then why,” she spits. “Why did your eyes look like them?”

He sighs and rakes a hand through his wet, muddy hair, pulling out bits of the bog as he does. “It’s a long story, Kid, but this place it’s filled with power, with dark power.” She nods, slowly and understandingly. “Now there are people that know how to tap into that power, all over the universe, the good side and the bad side, do you understand?”

“Not really,” she says, her lip trembling. “But…But…kinda…”

“Good,” he says, taking one slow step back away from the bog. “I had to use the dark power here because it’s so strong. I had to use it to save you. Now the Spirits and the drawings on the Citadel, those are beings that are very strong in the dark power.”

Kid looks up and then to the side, her one eye welling with tears. “But…but are you,” she asks, shakily. “Are you strong in the dark power?”

He considers it for a moment, whether or not he should lie to her. He doesn’t have time to describe the Force, the balance, the dark, and the light, the Sith and the Jedi. He doesn’t have time for any of this, but she’s afraid, and she’s helping him and has almost died because of it. “Yes,” he finally says, with a nod. “I am.”

She swallows and a tear slides down her cheek, tracing a path in the red dirt there. She sniffles and looks up at him, finally. “But you’re not like them,” she asks, finally, not sure if she can trust him.

“No,” says Ben. “They are Sith, somehow, or Sith Spirits,” he says. “I’m not a Sith. But I do know about the power here.”

Kid’s whole body is shaking and dripping with muddy bog water as she considers what to do next. Ben expects she weighing whether or not to ditch him, to stay behind, to hide, or to run; all of which he would understand.

“You used it to save me,” she finally says. Her little body collapses in on itself and she falls back onto the ground and hugs her knees to herself. “It was so scary!” She descends into violent sobs and wails as the shock of almost being drowned and eaten comes over her. Ben waits a moment, letting the weight of her feelings sit before he slowly walks toward her, giving her plenty of space to move away from him.

He slowly crouches down next to her and puts a hand on her wet head. She doesn’t jerk away, or recoil. Instead, she throws herself at him, her skinny arms impossibly tight around his neck as she tucks herself into his lap.

“It’s okay,” he says, patting her back like Leia used to do when he was sick or afraid. “It’s okay to be afraid. It was scary. But you’re safe now.”

She lets out another keening wail, right in his ear. He resists the urge to wince or to hush her. He thinks maybe, it’s best to let her scream and cry. What else should she do in such a case but scream and cry, it’s an appropriate response as any. So he holds her, cradling her head.

He doesn’t know how to comfort with words, they always feel awkward and heavy on his tongue. But he understands this, being so filled with too much that all you can do is scream and cry.

He felt that both as Ben and as Kylo Ren.

Ben was always at war with his own darkness, with the monsters in his head, for as long as he could remember, and that battle had been etched all over him, both inside and outside. He had known no in-between. As Ben Solo, he had once thought that his only option had been to fight the darkness, to keep it at arm’s length with fear and dread, or to succumb to it. As Kylo Ren he had thought the same thing, the battle equally fierce with the light inside of him that haunted his every step.

But now he’s feeling something else, entirely. Fear of the darkness had almost gotten Kid killed because he didn’t believe in his own ability to not be overcome by it. Now he feels something that neither the boy or Kylo Ren knew.

What it means to not be afraid of the light or the darkness.


	9. You Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey finds herself back in Exegol to witness what she desperately hopes is not the last chapter in Ben's story. Ben finally gets Kid to the Citadel, but...

Of all the places Rey has been, all the places she has scavenged for Ben Solo, this is the last place she wanted to return too. Her single-mindedness, her focus on the mission, all of it is keeping her afloat, all of it is holding her together by the bits and strings that are left of her, the ones that are straining against the weight of all that has happened, and all that is happening.

She cannot stop to consider what it means to have her own soul ripped in two, the violation and the pain and the loneliness that reverberates inside of her is beyond words.

And now, in this place that haunts what little sleep she has been able to take since then, the Force has seen fit to torture her just a little bit more. She is ashamed of that feeling, her resentment of the Force, the way it came to her aid and ignored Ben, the way it tossed her aside when it was done with her leaving Ben to do what he thought he had too.

All of it seemed so terribly unfair, terribly unjust, and so unbalanced. She watches as she defeats Palpatine. She does not think on him long except to know that she will never take his name, that his line will never be hers. She will bury it in the sand.

She is a Skywalker now, she had said, so desperately to the creature on Atollon. He had not believed her, he had laughed at her, but it’s true. This…this thing…this thing of evil and darkness who had terrorized the Skywalkers over and over and over again, she would not claim him. Not ever. 

She watches, curiously, as Reys falls.

She had never given much thought to death, or what it would look like or sound like or feel like. It had been peaceful, quick. She had completed her mission and then expired, as all good heroes should. She watches and waits. She does not know how long she is dead, obviously, she was not there for it.

It spins her mind and she wonders where she had gone during that time. Had she become one with the Force or faded into oblivion? When she struck down Palpatine did something happen to her, did something enter into her, some power or some nature of the Sith that prevented her from passing on in peace?

There is no way to know. So she sits and waits as the lonely, greying woman waits. And she feels him, his strength, his desperation, his worry, his love.

He is filled with it. For her.

His hand clamps down like a vice on the lip of the pit. She can sense his pain, his broken body and his broken soul. He must have felt it when she died, what she is feeling now except even more keen and painful. He must have felt it. 

He claws his way to her, his body contorting and collapsing in unnatural ways. He crawls and claws and battles toward her still body and he cradles her in a way that she never knew someone could. Like she is precious- no matter how fiercely she has fought him, how she has raged against him, no matter her name or bloodline, he holds her like she is precious.

She holds herself and shudders.

Will she feel him again?

Will he ever hold her like that again, will she be able to hold him in return?

She watches as the boy, the man, the culmination of all his wounds, rage, love and passion, looks around the empty temple, disarmed and afraid and so deeply alone. She sees him realize that, even now, he is alone- there is no one for him to call upon.

There is only him. And she sees the moment of decision as it happens. He clutches her to him, and she wonders if he knows he is going to die. She thinks he does, and he decides to hold her for a moment, uncertain that he will ever be able to hold her so close again.

Rey wants to cry, to break as angry tears claw at the back of her eyes. When he lets her go, he places his hand on her stomach and Rey can feel the power that converges there; the light, the pure selfless love flowing out of him, and breathing life into her.

She clutches her chest again and feels him there, the life coursing inside of her. She feels the circle closing, a wrong being made right, a wound, of some kind, being healed, whether he knows it or not.

_“Love can’t save you, Padme, only my new powers can do that.”_

She sees herself, born to life again. She sees herself abruptly wake from wherever she had been, as if waiting for him, some part of her soul knowing that he would never leave her behind.

She asks the question, tentatively and knowing.

“Ben?”

She doesn’t really need to ask. But she wants to say it. She wants him to hear it. She wants to say it not for the purposes of pleading him back to the light, but rather speaking the truth of who is over him. And then she does the only thing she can do.

Rey touches her lips as she watches Ben, watches herself. She tries to find a trace of it there. Had she known he was about to die in her arms would she have pulled away? Would she have held him a moment longer?

It seems cruel now, but still she holds it close to her heart. And then in an unbelievable blink of an eye, he leaves hear. He falls in her arms, through her fingers, like everything else. Somehow, she was able to hold onto all the things she needed- the Force, her instincts, her strength.

But all the things she _wanted_ \- those things just fell away so easily.

She wants to weep for him, for her, for the woman whose heart is tender but who cannot indulge in tears, not now. She looks almost cold, to anyone watching. But she feels so much. She feels them still, simmering beneath her. She is ready to cry, to sob, to feel the cathartic release, but she can’t, she can’t feel that until she saves him or knows for certain that he cannot be saved, either will give her the closure she needs, be it ecstasy or heartbreak.

But she needs to see it happen.

It was about more than gathering and scavenging the bits of Ben’s shattered soul, it was about seeing the whole of his story, the collective journey of who he is. So that even if she cannot save him, even if she cannot redeem their future together, she will tell of how he redeemed himself. She will tell the story of Ben Solo over and over and over again until it replaces the story of Kylo Ren.

She will tell the story of the boy who fought, she will tell the story of the student who showed mercy, who slew his master for her, who ran into hell for her with nothing but a Kriffing blaster; she will tell the story of the man who dragged his bloody and broken body from a pit, who dragged a legacy, kicking and screaming with him, the man who redeemed that legacy with one moment. By doing what Anakin had wanted so desperately to do, who against all hope, gave the whole of himself to save the one he loves.

The woman does not linger long after the body is gone. Rey is so close to that woman. She can almost reach out and touch her, grab her, assure her that there is still hope. She walks away, urgency and mission in her step. Rey looks at the empty spot where Ben had been and slowly walks toward it.

She had not thought of it before. She had been too hurried, too urgent. There was not enough time to think, to linger, to feel.

But if she fails, if she cannot save him, she must remember this, what was given so that she could live. She kneels down in the dirt and the death and slowly, delicately, takes up the sweater. It’s soft and breathable, not a cage.

She takes her moment now. The moment she had denied herself and she gathers the sweater in her hands, and hugs it to her chest, dropping her face into it, her fingers searching for anything of him that may still be there. This isn’t the same as the crest, the paper, the sabers- this is something else. This is not for anyone else, or for any other reason than that she wants it.

She decides that that’s a good enough reason as any.

###

“That’s it,” cried Kid, tugging at Ben’s hand and pulling him over the rocky terrain. “That’s it! That’s it!”

“’ Course it is,” Ben says, “looking at the towering spire, red and glinting in the electric sky. “What else would it be.” Kid starts moving starts running, stumbling in her excitement. “Hey settle down, you don’t want to fall and break her head before we get there.”

Kid scrunches up her nose but obeys. “My momma is there,” she says.

“Will you be able to find her?”

“Oh yea,” she says with a firm nod. “The slaves are only allowed on the edges of the citadel.” She looks up at him, suddenly sad. “But you should stay put. They’ll let me in because I’m a slave but you’re…” she motions at him. “You’re not supposed to be here. The guards may kill you.”

“Guards?”

She nods. “Yeah,” she says. “The Massassi.”

“The ones who took your eye?”

She nods. “They are scary.” Ben nods and she looks up at him. “But I’ll protect you.” She’s smiling at him, at the joke, like she wants him to laugh. But he doesn’t, instead, he holds his her hand a little tight and nods.

“I know you will,” he says, with a nod. Her smile fades a little and he sees a wave of sadness fall over her face before she turns and continues to lead him toward the citadel. They don’t speak for a while, and Ben is fighting the desire to offer to take her with him again. He doesn’t know how to take someone who was created for this place out of it, he didn’t even know if she could survive.

The last wrap he had put around her ankle was beginning to be dragged down by the cuff. It was attached to something, but to what? This place? The Master? How could he break an invisible chain? He is certain, despite what Kid may think, that Kid’s mother would want her to leave if she could.

But he remembers his own heartbreak, his own fears, the nightmare that became his life when he was dragged across the galaxy to the temple. Away from his mother, and no one thought to ask him if that was what he truly wanted.

He wouldn’t do that to Kid. He wouldn’t separate her from her mother.

“Alright,” Kid finally says, looking up at him. “This is as far as you should go.” She points past the Citadel, toward a place where the dark clouds seemed to gather like a thick blanket. “The Gate is that way. I wish I could tell you how to get out,” she says. “I don’t even know if it’s possible.”

“Well,” he says. “If it’s not then I’ll just have to find another way, I guess.” Ben looks toward the Citadel. “And you can get home safe from here?”

“Yes,” she says. “We go much further when we go hunting for food.”

He nods, but he feels sick in his stomach at the thought of walking away from her. “You’re sure?” He looks down at her intently, hoping she hears the question he’s asking, making sure that she wishes to stay. Instead of answering, she holds out her arms to him. Ben picks her up easily and she hugs him tight around his neck, sniffling in his ear.

“Thank you, Ben,” she says. “For watching out for me.”

“Ohh no,” he says, shaking his head. “No…thank you for watching out for me.”

She nods and pulls away with a wide grin. “That’s true,” she says. “If I hadn’t come around and started chewing on your leg something much bigger may have found you!”

Ben laughs and lowers her to the ground. “So true.”

He wants to feel better about it as Kid starts walking toward the Citadel. He wants the tightness in his chest to abate as he moves towards the Gates, he wants peace to settle in on him that he has reunited Kid with her mother.

But he can’t shake the feeling of unease.

About Kid.

About her mom.

About this place.

Even as his chance out becomes clearer and clearer, so did the undeniable truth that something is not right here. Something in this place is deeply broken and the poison, he is sure, is spreading even beyond the gates. 

####

Rey is staring once again into that frosted, glassy mirror. It had shown her so much that she had not been able to fully understand, so much that now felt useless knowing what she knows about herself. She stares at it.

And anger flares inside of her.

She cannot indulge grief right now, but anger…anger would not be kept at bay.

“Why didn’t you show me,” she whispers, her words coming out in an angry puff of air. “Why didn’t you show me the truth?”

Before she knows what she’s doing she slams her fist into the mirror, the cracks web across it, obscuring her face even more.

She screams, and the sound is deafening as every version of her joins. The scream echoes across time and space and gathers in a moment of blind rage. She slams her fist into it again.

And again.

And again.

But it doesn’t break.

She kicks it and she screams again, feral and unkempt. She falls to her knees, still clutching the sweater too her. She muffles her scream into it and slams her eyes shut, squeezing back the current of tears, the effort making her shake wildly as though she were about to be flung into million pieces. She falls onto her side, her white clothes now caked in the moist earth as she shook with rage. A rage that she was certain made her unworthy of the Jedi living inside of her.

Unworthy of the name Skywalker.

Unworthy of the saber.

But somehow she didn’t care. Not in that moment.

She didn’t care about any of it if she didn’t have Ben.

Why did any of it matter if she was alone?

“You’re not alone.”

Her eyes fly open and she is on her knees, looking around frantically. She spins around back toward the splintered mirror and she sees him on the other side, through the cracks and broken bits, she sees him, sitting on his knees just like her.

“Ben,” she asks. She holds out a hand, her fingertips touch the cracked surface, the motion of his hand mirrors hers as it rises to press against the other side.

“You’re a hard person to find.”

“You’re a hard person to get rid of,” she says, the barest of laughs in her voice. She gazes at him through the barrier, and she swears she can see his breath fogging up the glass, or maybe it’s hers. “How…how are you here?”

“You’re still holding on.”

She rests her forehead on the glass, in perfect time with him.

“I’ve got you, Ben,” she says. “I won’t let go. I’ll find you.”

“We’re not finished yet,” he says, soft and familiar.

“What am I though,” she asks, desperately speaking the fears that have been inside her since Exegol, the things she cannot speak out loud, the things the creature had all but called out in her. “The Jedi are in me but so is…so is he, and I don’t know what that means or what to do. I want to bury his name in the dirt and never have to think about it again.”

“Rey,” he says it like it’s an answer. “You’re a Palpatine.”

She shakes her head against the cold glass. “No.”

“You’re nothing," he continues. 

“No,” she says again.

“A scavenger.”

“No.”

“The last Jedi.”

“No,” she feels herself starting to unravel, something in her coming undone as she hears all that she is and all that she isn’t. “I’m afraid that I’m not enough,” she says finally. “I’m afraid of all that’s inside of me now. I don’t know if I have what I need to save you.”

He looks at her, like he did in the hut on Ach-To, as he did on Exegol. “Ah…” like she has spoken the only truth about herself that she is certain of right now, the only one he has an answer to. “You do.” Soft and certain.

“Ben,” she says, finally looking up. The glass is fogging and he’s fading out of focus on the other side. “I want you to know,” she says. “I was…” her voice breaks and she looks down at the ground, at the sweater tangled in her hands. “If I fail,” she whispers. “I will tell everyone the story of Ben Solo.” She looks up and he’s all but gone, fading back into the dark. “I promise.”

It’s the only promise she knows that she can make. When she looks up again, she is no longer in the cave. She is on the grassy surface of Ach-To, away from the powerful darkness that lives in the cave, that powerful darkness that had so frightened Luke and had so called to her.

But something about it felt…different, a darkness not made of the same stuff as Palpatine, but a darkness that looked and moved more like a shadow, revealing fear and weakness and want. A darkness that only grows when curiosity is replaced by fear and revulsion.

She breathes in the chilly air and stands once more.

To the final place of her mission, where all the pieces must be gathered.

She had seen it in the mask, seen it in her dreams, the place where the first wound was dealt, where the first die was cast that changed the fate of every Skywalker that would come after.

The place where the first healing must take place.

###

Ben doesn’t quite make it to the gate. He’s almost there. He can see it, looming in the clouded distance. He will rip it down with his own hands if it means getting back to her. He will climb and fall and climb a million times to return to her.

But he stops, all the same.

He freezes only a short walk away from the gate.

He freezes, and then, surprising himself, he laughs. He laughs hard and heaving. He bends over at the waist and laughs until he cries. Because it’s all so ridiculous.

He hates himself. He berates himself about why he fails at everything he does. He failed at being good. He failed at being bad. And now he is about to fail at getting out of here. He looks up at the sky, at the putrid, diseased realm he finds himself in.

“Dammit, Solo,” he mutters to himself. He’s not a hero. He’s not. So why the Kriff is he turning around, and running, as idiotically as he had into Exegol, back toward the Citadel.

It seems he has never been good at doing anything half-way, even failing.


	10. All Who Loved Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey goes to Tattoine. Ben goes to the Citadel.

It’s a terrible planet, is the first thing Rey thinks as the Falcon touches down on Tatooine. It’s a hot, almost abandoned wasteland, a planet filled with wickedness, and oppression, and death. Anakin was enslaved here, he lost his mother here, he began his descent into darkness and revenge here, Luke’s family was murdered here, and…

It’s all so much.

And it’s why she is certain this is where she must bring all the pieces together. It’s where everything went wrong and where everything must be made right.

The most wicked of pasts can still be redeemed in the future- as long as she isn’t too afraid to face it. So she does. She looks at the sweater clutched in her lap still and almost makes a move to pull it on, over her own head, but she stops as she looks out at the sprawling, wasteland of sand. She places it, lovingly in the co-pilot seat of the Falcon. It was already holding on by a thread and traipsing around a desert planet would not help it, and she didn’t want it to get all sandy.

No one likes sand.

She descends the ramp and steps out on the planet, at the small home where Luke had once lived. She breathes in and despite it all, despite the pain and suffering that had unfolded on this planet, she can feel that it is not without hope, and certainly not without love.

She takes a moment to explore. She is not sure why, every step until now had been filled with urgency, filled with purpose, but for some reason, for a moment, she feels that need rest. Perhaps she needs this before she does whatever it is she needs to do.

The creature who had told her so much had not told her exactly what to do, just that she had to scavenge and bear witness so that she could make a way for Ben Solo to return. She had come to learn, when those who are strong with the Force give cryptic instructions, one could usually rely on the Force to make the path clear.

So she waits until it is clear.

She explores the house and the rooms. She wonders where Luke may have stood, and she wonders what Luke did to pass the time at such a desolate place.

She plays even, skidding down a sand dune, something that she once did for survival. It feels different now. And she wonders what else she will discover when she gets Ben Solo back, what new feelings and experiences will be available to her when the galaxy is not laying on her shaking shoulders. She wonders what kind of human she will be when she has the chance to rest. She wonders, as she adjusts the bag on her shoulder, filled with the loose pieces of Ben’s story, what kind of human he will be when he has the chance to breathe free- she thinks she knows some, but she also knows there’s so much more.

She takes time, first, because she knows, somehow, that there is still time, to honor her Masters. She wishes she could lay them to rest somewhere they both loved, somewhere they both called home. But such a place does not exist that she knows of, and, while there is some time, there is not enough, and she feels she must do this first if she is to focus on what she has to do next.

So she prepares the sabers, swaddling them lovingly and tenderly. They, like this planet, hold so much in them; so much evil and so much good. She thinks of Luke’s saber, the one Anakin used to cut down children, and shudders. But it’s not the whole story- the evil or the good is rarely the whole story. She thinks of Luke himself, someone she, somehow both loved and hated all at once. She thinks of Leia so filled with love and compassion for her, so uncertain of what to do with her own son. She loved him, she does not doubt it, and perhaps Leia had seen Rey as a chance to set things right, to not make the same mistakes she had made with her own son. She supposes that she will never know. Leia was a hero, a princess, a General, a mother, a wife, and she both excelled and failed at all of them over and over again. She was, after all, a human. And Rey loved her dearly.

She holds the two wrapped sabers to her chest for a moment and breathes in. The day is fading into night and she feels the tugging return, the urgency of what she needs to do, the reminder of the future that is at stake. 

So she buries them, drawing the sabers into the dirt and the sand. Her heart aches as she does like something is being pried from her fingers, slowly and painfully, something she is trying, desperately to cling to.

" _You're still holding on..." he had told her once, desperate and pleading and angry. "Let go!"_

And she thinks again of the way the creature laughed at her on Atollan when she had said her name. Bitterness rises in her and she digs her feet in, clinging once again to what some part of her is so desperately trying to release and set free.

She stands when she feels someone close to her. She is an old woman, not so unlike the woman she had seen on Jakku, and Rey feels a wave of emotion and she wonders if the woman on Jakku is still alive. Did she die there, struggling for bread and water? The same way Rey had so often wondered, feared, that she would die. Rey quickly chokes down that fear, forcing it into the dirt with the saber and something inside of her rages as she does, begging to be seen and heard.

She ignores it.

“Who are you,” the woman asks, frail and tired.

She waits a moment, not sure if she should lie. “Rey,” she says finally.

Rey can feel the question before it comes, and she balks on the inside. That damn question, the one she can’t escape, and she finds herself longing for the time when someone looked at her and knew that she was a nobody and didn’t give a damn. She makes a mental note to ask Finn how often he gets that question and what name he had settled on. She had never felt the need to ask Finn what his family name is.

“Rey who?”

Rey swallows hard, but she smiles, because what else can she do. If she answers that question, if she feels all that comes with the answer in that question, she will break. She knows it. Her insides scream under the weight of the smile plastered on her face. She looks down at the buried sabers, and out into the distance.

Trying to summon up something.

Anything.

Rey Palpatine.

Rey Solo.

Rey Nobody.

Rey…

Just Rey…

But all of them break her heart- all of them hold pain and promise, all of them hold wounds that she doesn’t know how to face yet.

She turns back to the woman.

“Rey Skywalker,” she says. But her voice is hollow and distant.

_“Is that so,” the creature had said when she had offered that same answer to his query._

She looks out at the twin suns setting in the distance and she wonders how often Luke had done this, filled with longing for something else for something more. For adventure and purpose and a place in the story of the galaxy.

She remembers looking out into the desert of Jakku for something, but it was never adventure, it was never the Force. It was always family, belonging, people to love and love her, people to look out for, and to look out for her.

She almost had it. It was in her grasp, so close she could taste it.

Everything she wanted.

When the woman was gone, Rey slid her bag off her shoulder and gently lay the pieces out on the dirt in front of her.

The crest- for the Prince of Alderaan.

The bit of tattered paper- for the adolescent who desperately called out for someone, anyone, to be with him.

The blue saber- for the Padawan who showed mercy, who had no place to go.

The piece of Vader’s mask- for the man who was capable of, and did, great evil.

The dice- for the Solo, who runs into hell armed with a blaster.

Seeing it in front of her, marked so deeply with suffering and love, with hope and despair, she knows it’s not enough, there should be, will be, more.

She holds her hand out over the pieces and closes her eyes.

“Be with me,” she whispers, not to everyone, not to all of them. But to the ones who know, the ones who love Ben, those who have gone, and there are so many. She is the last one alive who loves him, so she calls on the others. “Be with me. Show me where he is.”

She feels it when it changes, the hairs on her arm stand up, and voices that are clear. The Force may be cruel at times, it may decide who and when to discard, but it can be wielded with compassion, with love. And she feels it now. Not just her love, but Schmi’s love, Padme’s love, Anakin’s love, Luke’s love, Han’s love, Leia’s love.

She can’t do this unless she knows they loved him. And she can feel it now, bleeding from her and into the pieces of Ben at her feet, they are calling out to him, carving a path, opening a way.

“Rey.” Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t need to look, she knows that voice. “Find my grandson and bring him back. He’s waiting for you, and he can’t escape without you.” She can feel time and space unfolding in front of her. She need only step through. “We’ve shown you the way to him,” says Anakin. “But remember the lesson.” She wants to ask what he means, what is the lesson, but she knows there isn’t time. She steps forward. “Remember the lessons of the past, without them you will not save him.”

She feels herself falling again, through cold and darkness, through light and dark, through space and time. But she is not afraid. She is not falling without purpose or direction. She feels their hands on her still, their voices echoing around her.

She is not alone.

And soon, she’ll never have to be alone again.

###

Ben is surprised at the ease with which he had found Kid and her family. It seems that security at the outskirts of the Citadel is less than stellar, but that tended to be the case with places strong in the dark side it seemed, getting to Exegol had been a breeze after all. He supposed it also helped that there is no where the slaves could go, they were chained by the darkness to whoever their Master is.

There are no homes or beds but they all gather outside the center of the Citadel, leaned against the walls. They all look different, some look like Kid, others are bigger, some have four arms, and some have no arms. Some are humanoids, like Kid, and some look more animalistic. But they all have the same look in their eyes- broken, beaten and hurting.

He wonders that Kid had cared at all about him. Perhaps, she unlike many had the benefit of having a mother. He can hear her before he sees her, speaking animatedly to a group of other small ones gathered around her. When she comes into view she is sitting in the lap of another humanoid who does look like her, who is clutching her tight.

“And then,” she says waving her arms about wildly. “The leviathan took me under the water in its deathly clutches!”

“No way,” protested one of the small ones. “If that were true you would have been gobbled up!”

Kid rolls her eyes and crosses her arms. “I told you I had a friend!”

“Right,” says one of the small ones. “The one who gave you a name.”

“He didn’t give me a name,” says Kid. “I GAVE MYSELF A NAME!”

“And you saved him from the leviathan to then,” scoffs one of the small ones, clearly not buying the story.

“That’s right,” says Kid, nodding. “I saved him a lot!”

“Liar,” says one. Ben approaches, slowly and tentatively, not wanting to frighten anyone. So far, no one had bothered to stop him or ask questions, few could be bothered to give him a curious eye, but if he had approached them, he is not so sure that he wouldn’t be seen as an aggressor.

“She’s actually not lying,” he says. The small ones all gasp and turn around and Kid’s eye goes wide before she struggles free of the arms of her mother.

“Ben,” she cries and hurries over to him. Ben kneels down next to her and looks up at Kid’s mother, briefly, making sure she knows that he sees her, that he knows who she is. Ben lets Kids hug him around the neck before she turns and faces her friends. “See,” she says, pointing over her shoulder. “I told you I made a friend!”

The small ones all clamored to their feet and ran over to where Ben knelt. They all, almost, looked exactly like Kid, born of the same creation that she is, the same pale, grey, the same scraggly hair, the same teeth, and hooked claws, but as they shouted out their questions, tugged at his clothes, reached up and pulled his hair until his head lowered enough for them to manhandle, he could hear the differences in their voices, see the different expressions in their faces, and the way they carried themselves. All slaves, likely treated as if they were all the same.

“What about my name, Ben,” says another small one.

“Yeah me too!”

“We want names!”

“All right,” says Ben, moving to stand, only to find one of the small ones, even smaller than Kid, clinging to his neck and yelping with fear as he comes off the ground dangling off the ground, clinging to Ben.

“Where did you come from,” he asks. The small one shrugs sheepishly and Ben gently untangles him and places him back on the ground. He stands again and finds himself face to face with Kid’s mother.

“Uh, hi,” he says. The woman looks at him, eyes narrowing, her muscular body tense and coiled like a viper ready to strike him. “I’m Ben and…”

“I know who you are,” she says, her voice cold. “Why are you here?”

Why is he here?

Because he’s an idiot.

Because he never knows what the right thing or the wrong thing is.

Because he loves Kid and the thought of leaving her on this hellscape made him sick.

“I came to see if I could help you.”

“Help us what,” asks the woman. Ben looks down as tiny clawed fingers grasp his hand. This one isn’t Kid, it’s one of the nameless small ones, she turns his hand around in hers, takes each finger and wiggles it around exploringly. He resists the urge to pull away, hoping it doesn’t take an experimental bite out of him as Kid did.

“I…” he looks up at the Citadel. “Help you, get out I guess.”

She snarls. “There is no way out,” she says. “We were born here, and we live here.”

“Do you die here,” he asks.

She snorts. “We work until the Master or a guard sees fit to dispose of us or one of the hell creatures takes us,” she says. “I have been here as long as it has existed, one of the first to be made here.”

He looks down at her foot, at the matching cuff around her ankle. He wonders how long she has worn it, how tough her skin may have grown to protect herself from it.

“Is there no way to set you free?”

Ben hears the small ones fall quiet, waiting for an answer, their gaze moving from Ben to the mother in front of him, her eyes flashing dangerously.

“No,” she spits. “And don’t bother trying. The chains keep us here, forever bound in servitude to the Master.” She reaches down and picks up Kid and holds her close. “I thank you for returning her to me,” she says, her voice tight. “But you shouldn’t be here, and it does no good to lie to us about being set free.”

“Do you know it’s a lie,” he asks. “You’re certain.”

“The Master is as old as time,” she says. “As long as the Master lives, so does our servitude.”

Ben stares at her for a moment and then back up at the Citadel. “Is that where the Master is,” he asks.

The woman follows his gaze to the gleaming tip of the Citadel. “Yes,” she says slowly with a nod. “It is.” She turns back to Ben and fixes him with a look that translates across species. “Why?” A warning and an accusation.

“If there’s a way to set you all free,” he says. “It would be there?”

“There isn’t a way.”

“You know this,” said Ben, looking at her. “You know for certain? You’ve tried.”

For a moment, a shade of doubt crosses her face and she clutches Kid tighter too her. “It’s always been this way,” she says, her voice trembling. “It’s always been this way.”

Ben should leave now. It’s his out. His chance to go back to the Gate and try to escape. He’s done everything he can. But he can’t turn away from her- from a mother clutching her child to her. He doesn’t know how they came to be. He doesn’t know if they were born, brought here, or created…but it doesn’t really matter. They are here, and they are alive, and Kid had been kind to him when she didn’t have to be.

“What if it doesn’t have to be,” he says. “What if there’s a way.”

He doesn’t know how that way may be, but he does know the dark side of the Force is strong, and even if they didn’t understand it, he did. This was, likely, their only chance. If their master was strong in the dark side, maybe it won’t have been for nothing. Even if he can’t make it out of here, even if he is trapped here forever, maybe it won’t all be wasted. Maybe he can do something, one thing, right.

“There’s not.”

Ben steps closer to her. Kid is looking back and forth between them, nerves and excitement flickering on her face.

“Maybe,” he says. He looks back up at the Citadel, where the darkness was gathering and converging. “Maybe I can find a way. If that’s what you would want.”

She bobs Kid up and down on her hip, torn and conflicted, too afraid to let hope fester, even for a moment. “It’s impossible,” she says again, shaking her head, but her voice is no longer resolute, but sad. “This is all our life has been, and all our lives will ever be. It does no good to think otherwise.”

“All the same,” he says. “I would like to try.”

She holds his gaze silently for a moment until Kid leaned back so she could look at her. She presses one hand to her cheek.

“It’s okay, momma,” she says. She looks over her shoulder at Ben. “I think maybe Ben can do it.” She presses her forehead to her mother’s and kisses her nose. “Maybe we can be free.”

He doesn’t know what that means, or what would be next for the slaves if they were to be free. He just knew something about this place was rotten and sick, and the source was here. Kid’s mother looks at him one more time, she doesn’t say anything, she can’t bring herself too. But, almost imperceptibly she nods.

And it’s all Ben needs.

###

There are guards the closer he gets to the center of the Citadel, but they look more animal than anything else, set to defend the Citadel against any other dangers that may pass the gates. He knows there are more somewhere, the sort that would take Kid’s eye away as punishment. But they are nowhere to be found.

He is able to quickly scale the walls of the Citadel, his hands, and feet finding purchase on the brick and stone that form it. The tip of the citadel is winking in the light, the only bit of jeweled décor in the otherwise unadorned citadel.

When he reaches the top of the spire, to the final window, he peeks inside first into the dark room, he finds quickly that he is not completely cut off from the Force and the dark side is thriving inside. He pulls himself into the room and lands stealthy on the floor. It’s cool inside, almost moist, a welcome relief from the heat of this place.

He surveys the room, again, assuring that it is empty. Also finding, unfortunately, that it is empty of weapons as well. The room itself is dark and circular, the walls lined with graphs and pictures, scribbled numbers and words in languages long dead. He is not surprised, when he looks closer, that they are scribbled in Sith language, a course, regretfully, not covered in Luke’s Jedi training. But the pictures, the pictures are enough to horrify him. Page after page of illustrations of gruesome experiments, and wicked transformations.

He finds blueprints for something that looks like the leviathan. He goes to a table and flips through one of the books there that looks like a journal. More pictures. More equations. More untranslatable horror. He pauses on one page with a drawing that looked familiar.

It’s the rough outline of Kid (or some version of her), to the side there is a list, as though he were looking at a cookbook. He picks up another one and flips through it, uncertain of what he is looking for, knowing that right now he is going in completely blind. He needs something to orient himself something too ground himself.

He stops on another page, the light sketch of a jewel in the middle of it. It is covered in notes and ink and a name…a name that flashes in his memory, one he had heard of in his travels with Luke. In fact, he had read her chronicles, briefly and half-heartedly, only semi-amused by Luke’s pithy comments that he wrote in the margins.

_Sorzus Syn._

A powerful Sith Lord. One of the first. But she was long dead, surely. He flips through the pages wishing he could read them, and wondering how much he would have to give himself over to the dark Force power here to pick up on something, on anything in these pages that would help him.

She was obsessed, he remembers, she was obsessed with Sith alchemy, the manipulation of life to create her own warriors, her own creature, her own…

Slaves.

“So…” He closes the book and spins around in the room. “Now that you know, dear boy.” He can’t find the source of the voice echoing throughout the dark room, purring wickedly in his ear. He backs away toward the window, his stance wide and ready to jump, to fight, to run. “What are you going to do about it?”

He makes a break toward the window but does not reach it before a flash of red lighting fills the room, striking him in the shoulder. He falls hard, all the energy and strength forced from his body. He seems them coming from the darkness, like the Force ghosts he had heard about from Luke but also, horrifyingly different. They are cold, with empty cavernous eyes, and mouths sewed tight, their black robes billowed around them like storm clouds. He tries to push himself up on his elbow, but before he can he feels mercilessly cold hands on the back of his neck jerking him to his knees. He looks up at the pale empty face, devoid of all life and he shudders. They are ghosts, but barely, clinging to something that could not be called light.

Another figure emerges from the shadows, solid and flesh before him, somehow.

“Do you know who I am then,” she asks, her voice is quiet, almost soft, but filled with venom. She towers over him, almost magnificent if her very presence were not sucking the light and life out of him, out of everything in the room.

He feels one of the specters holding him down grab the back of his hair and jerk his face up toward her as though demanding submission. She bends at the waist, so she is looking at him in the eye.

“Well boy,” she says. “DO you?”

“Sorzus Syn,” he breathes, finally gaining control of his jaw back after the electric shock.

“Very good,” she purrs, reaching out a hand and cupping his face. “And what have you to say of that?”

He snorts, slightly. “Nothing I guess,” he says, looking around the room for a weapon, for anything other than what he knows is his only option for facing her if he wants to get out alive. “Except that, if I may, you look good for being thousands of years old.”

She throws her head back and laughs, and the sound makes his skin crawl. “Oh my,” she says. “I must say you’ve caused quite a stir in my little slice of the universe.” She moves closer, her grey face inches from his, her red eyes assessing him curiously. “I don’t smell a Sith spirit in you.”

He shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I got lost.”

She raises a thin eyebrow, a smirk curling at her cruel lips. “How unfortunate for you,” she says. “It’s a shame that I can’t keep you here.” She stands up, and Ben gets a sinking feeling. He’s running out of time, quickly. “I feel like you would be amusing to keep around.”

The spirits, somehow ghosts but also fueled by the dark side, keep him rooted to the spot. He swears inwardly and closes his eyes and focuses.

Here he goes again.

“Dispose of him,” ordered Syn.

He lets the power of this place into him once again, this time without restraint this time without fear. He would never see Rey again if he died, or whatever “disposing” of him means. It fills him again, like a drug, fueling his body with strength. It siphons into him, through his veins and into his blood.

He knows that the dark side is powerful.

He knows that it is seductive.

But it had never been like this. So consuming. He lets it take control and he is able to stand, lightning crackling from his own hands and he leaps forward.

“WAIT!”

He freezes mid-air. Syn turns around and looks at him again, frozen in front of her, his body once again not his own. He’s alive, at least, but he has no power here compared to hers. This is her realm, and as it flows through him, as he stands in front of her, he realizes that any power he has here, is her power. This is her world.

But yet, she does not kill him but steps forward again. He boils with rage, stronger than he has ever felt. He wants her to die. He wants to kill her, for some reasons that he knows and some that he doesn’t, some of it is just darkness coursing through him, strong and vivid.

“Hmmm,” she says, circling his frozen body. She touches his shoulder, his back, she reaches for his face and he snarls violently at her, drawing another cold chuckle from the Sith Lord. “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll have some use for you after all.”

He doesn’t get to respond. He’s helpless again. Powerless again.

He couldn’t get to Rey. He couldn’t free Kid.

Darkness takes him, and the last thing he sees is her wide, fanged smile.


	11. The One She Should Fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben has a chat with Sorzus. Rey has a chat with herself.

Ben dreams of Snoke.

His voice.

His face.

His threats.

For so long they fueled his darkness- mixing in some indistinguishable mass of hatred and admiration, longing and revulsion. He thought then that it made him powerful- the suffering, the pain, the darkness. He thought it made him better, rather than breaking him into a million pieces.

He had no idea until he ran into Exegol to find Rey, until he poured his own life into hers, how powerful he could truly be if he were to only let go of his hate. He doesn’t want to be here.

He kicks and reaches up, grasping toward the surface toward her. She’s here somewhere, standing above him, on the other side. She’s reaching for him breaking through, her fingers straining in the darkness. He kicks harder, he wants to yell to her, to let her know that he is there but he is certain that the darkness will flood inside of him, filling him completely.

The darkness seems to thicken and harden around him, stalling his forward movement, freezing him in place. He thrashes, kicks, and claws but he cannot move through it. He can’t break through. He can’t get to her.

He’s too far gone. Too deep in the dark.

He wakes gasping and growling in a cell. Without thinking, he flings himself forward against the bars, but as soon as he touches them they crackle and send him flying back, smoke rising from his hands.

“My, my, my, you certainly delight in running head-first into things don’t you.”

Ben sits up, recovering more quickly this time then when she had struck him before. Through the bars he can see her sitting, cloaked in black, still looking at him as though he were a fascinating specimen to be examined and dissected.

“You know who I am.” A statement, not a question. She stands and strides over to his cell and wraps long, sharp fingers around the bars- unfazed by the electric current, as though everything in this world bends and parts for her. “But you,” she continues. “Neither Jedi or Sith. But strong in the dark and the light.”

She crouches down, lowering herself, and reaches through the bars and extends a finger toward him, he is jerked mercilessly across the cell until his forehead touches the tip of her finger. “And from rooting around in there..." she tapped lightly on his forehead. "I can see why. There is so much power in you, Solo.”

He scoffs. “Hate to disappoint you but everyone who’s ever said that to me ended up being wrong, some of them I even killed.”

She arches an elegant eyebrow over her red eyes and smirks. “You’re powerful,” she says. “But not that powerful. Not powerful enough to kill me, not here, not in this world. Which,” she adds, tapping him playfully on the forehead one more time before pulling her hand back. “I must say that I was a little annoyed with you at first that you happened into this little corner of the universe, it made me worried that perhaps a crack had formed, unbeknownst to me.” She laughs again. She does that a lot, but there is nothing about it that sets him at ease, in fact, it raises every instinct in him to run, confirming that he is cornered by a predator. He almost wishes she was looking at him in anger, as opposed to this sinister curiosity. “Imagine my delight when I found out that you found your way to me on purpose, that you willed yourself here.”

“I can’t imagine,” he says mockingly, but she remains unbothered by it.

“And for what,” she says. “For love?!” This time she accentuates her laugh by throwing her head back theatrically and Ben inhales deeply and exhales, biting back the desire to lash out at her through the bars. “You actually think that someone is going to come for you, that you’ll be able to get to her.” She leans through the bars. “My dear boy, this is your home now. Even if she could come for you, she would not be able to cross my gates, and even if she did what do you suppose she could do?”

Ben stares at her, the sound of his teeth grinding together filling his ears. “I am eternal,” she says. “This place- it feeds me, fills me with the spirits of every Sith who has come after me. Their souls are trapped here, and _they_ feed me, and I have found a way to live forever.”

She stands, but she does not walk away, she wants to look down at him, for him to feel like he’s nothing, that he is completely at her mercy. “I am your Master now,” she barks. “I have been missing a challenge and I wonder what fun experiment I could do on you.” 

“I will never have another Master,” he says, his voice low and gravelly. “Never.”

“Everything here,” she says. “I created. Every creature, every slave, every servant- they are born from my hand, from my alchemy. They all call me Master and soon…with enough persuasion, you will call me Master. Your old Master, Sidious, he was a fool- they all were fools, too small-minded and too temporary. They all sought immortality, but I am the only one to have achieved it. Men,” she scoffs. “All so impatient.”

She turns her back to him but pauses and looks over her shoulder. “Have you ever heard of the prophecy of the Sith’ari?”

“No,” he says. “But I’m sure I’m about too…”

“The Sith’ari,” she begins with practiced reverence as if holding something precious. “Will be free of limits. The Sith’ari will lead the Sith and destroy them. The Sith’ari will raise the Sith from death and make them stronger than before.” She turns back toward him and motions around her. “I am the Sith’ari, Ben Solo. I have made the Sith immortal in this place. They do not die and they do not fade. Your Palpatine was a fool and now he is here too, trapped by my power, waiting. I keep them alive, and they keep me alive until the day that we rise again. I will not merely swallow the galaxy, but the universe.” She cocks her head to the side. “And time will tell if you will be of use to me. But I would hate to waste a powerful Force user especially when I have grown so utterly bored here.”

“I guess being limitless doesn’t stop that, does it.”

“Unfortunately, there are some things that even absolute power cannot satisfy. But you needn’t hold onto any hope, Ben Solo. You cannot free my slaves. You cannot free yourself. I am your Master now.”

Ben holds her gaze for a moment, and then she turns, dramatic and sweeping to leave. But she stops abruptly, as though she felt something shift in the room, in his mind, as if she had caught scent she found disagreeable.

“You still think you can beat me somehow,” she says.

“Me,” he says, “Nah. I can’t beat you.”

She doesn’t walk away. He can feel her searching and sifting through his feeling, probing his thoughts, prying what she can from his grasp. “You still think she’s coming for you,” she says, incredulously, still refusing to turn around and look at him.

He scoffs. “You better pray she doesn’t.”

“Why is that,” she says. “You’ll kill me if I touch her,” she says, her voice dripping with mockery. “I am not afraid of you, Ben Solo.”

She begins to walk away, done with the conversation, done with him, for now. He laughs and shakes his head, causing a shooting pain to go down his spine. “Oh no,” he says. “You better hope she doesn’t come for me, for your sake, not hers.” He can feel it for the first time, a tiny flicker of irritation beneath her calm veneer as she pauses to cast one more side-long glance over her shoulder. She waits expectantly, daring him to continue. He does, his voice falling, the playfulness chased away by something he believes more than he’s ever believed in anything in his life. Something he believes in more than he ever believed in Luke, in Snoke, in the First Order- more than he ever even believed in himself

“It’s not me you should be afraid of, Sorzus Syn.”

###

Rey isn’t sure how long she has been walking, stumbling through the darkness toward the tiny pinprick of red, gloaming light in the future. She had passed through the portal that had opened before her and found herself surrounded by darkness.

She grumbles, inwardly that it couldn’t have dropped her off closer to wherever Ben was, wherever that glowing red light was coming from. She is sure Luke would have something Jedish to say about how the journey would make her strong enough to face him or something of that nature. But she is tired of journeys.

She is tired of lessons, despite what Anakin had told her.

“Remember the lesson…” he had said before she stepped through. There is always a damn lesson, another damn test, another…

She freezes, suddenly, overwhelmingly caught in a wave of darkness. It’s so strong she can’t breathe, she finds herself on her knees, gasping for a fresh gulp of air, but it won’t come. She wheezes, violently. It feels like something is reaching up her own throat and pulling it down inside of her, collapsing it in on herself.

“Remember the lesson, Rey…”

That voice. It’s familiar in all the worst ways. Dark and seductive, confident and mocking. She emerges from the darkness, arm outstretched, and fingers clasped in her own palm, choking the life out of Rey.

“It’s you,” Rey gasps.

“Me,” she says with a nod. The lightsaber ignites, red and crackling, illuminating the dark, and Rey sees her own face. “We’re not finished yet,” the other Rey smirks.

Rey jumps back as the saber swings toward her, narrowly missing her stomach.

“You’re not real,” screams Rey, unclasping her own saber and igniting it just in time to catch the red blade, knocking it away from her. “You’re not real!” Rey rages and advances her yellow saber clashing magnificently against the red. Shadowed Rey meets her with the same ferocity, her teeth bared and fanged.

“You’re not real,” she screams back, her voice perfectly mimicking Reys.

It frightened her. It angered her. It struck her.

“You ran away from me,” screams the other Rey. “You ran away from me, but where will you run this time?” She twirls out of the way of Rey’s yellow blade, her black dress twirling magnificently around her as one end of her saber swung up at Rey’s leg. Rey kicks her leg up and leaps out of the way. “It’s just you and me here, Rey!”

Rey knows it’s true. There is nothing but darkness and herself- cast in shadow, consumed by anger. Rey hates her, she hates everything about her. She hates the way she smirks. The way she dances. The way she speaks. She hates her power. Her rage. Her anger.

And she will end her, here and now. Bury her in the ground like those sabers. Rey advances like a woman possessed, never giving ground, never giving a second of rest. Her hands vibrate with power, with the force of their clashing sabers.

She will end her here. She can’t look at her another moment, and the other Rey is looking at her with a mirrored expression of revulsion and fury, both desperate to destroy the other.

_“You did not always fear the darkness so. What happened?”_

The creature’s question fills her, even as she gets the upper hand on the other Rey.

_“Remember the lesson of the past…”_

Rey is not sure if it is her screaming, or the other one, or both of them together, screaming into the void.

The lesson she had almost learned, the lesson that had been right at the hedge of her consciousness only to be pushed back when she learned the awful, truth of who she is.

 _“What happened?”_ The creature had asked her. She learned the truth, and it frightened her. She learned the truth that her darkness was hers, Palpatine or no, that it was hers alone. So she closed herself off again- closed herself off to the darkness that had so frightened Luke.

Closed herself off to the truth; the lesson.

The lesson of Anakin- as he sought out power to save his love.

The lesson of Leia and Han- who hid the truth from their son, the truth of his own grandfather.

The lesson of Luke- who saw the destruction of all that he loved and, in the briefest of moments, ignited his saber over the body of his sleeping nephew.

 _“When we fear the past we orchestrate the future we most fear.”_ \- the creature had told her before she began.

Their sabers crashed mercilessly against each other. The other Rey is on her knees in front of her, but still swinging, loud and vicious. She is the only one screaming now, and Rey listens to that scream, really listens to it for the first time, holding it in her hand and turning it over with curiosity. It's filled with anger, frenzy, fear, and, so much hurt.

_The lesson._

Suddenly, so sudden that both Rey’s seem shocked by the motion, Rey pulls away and stumbles back from her dark counterpart.

The woman who is her.

The girl who was her.

There is darkness there.

And she finds, maybe, that it is not evil. It is not the path to the dark side. But burying it is, burying it creates the most fertile breeding ground for it to come to fruition.

That is the path to the darkness.

Rey turns off her saber and regards the snarling woman before her.

“What are you doing,” she growls, her own saber still poised to strike.

Rey breathes in, expelling the fear, and instead steps back toward her. Rey takes her in curiously, her guard down and her eyes inquiring, searching. Rey takes another step, and she can feel the fear coming off her antagonist in waves. Rey moves closer and closer, until their fear, their rage, their loneliness, and their heartbeat are indistinguishable.

Rey is close enough to look the other one in the eye. And, up close, she does not see pure wickedness, or pure hate, she does see darkness, and she does see herself, all she could have been. And instead of fear or revulsion, as she looks into the eyes of her shadowed self, she feels deep and abiding compassion.

This is not a new feeling for her. She feels compassion as easily as she breathes, the same way she feels protectiveness and anger- they come easy. But self-compassion…it’s different somehow.

Rey reaches out a hand and places it over the hand of the other, still gripping her saber. Neither pulls away.

“It’s okay,” Rey says. “I’m not afraid of you.” Rey’s thumb moves over the switch of the shadowed Rey’s saber, their gazes still locked. She switches off the saber, both ends disappearing. “It’s okay that you’re angry. Of course, you’re angry.” The snarl falters, slightly, stubbornly fighting the emotions creeping into her face. “You were left behind. You were an orphan. Completely at the mercy of everyone bigger and stronger than you.”

“Shut up,” growls the other Rey, she tries to pull away, but Rey’s hand remains firmly clasped over hers.

“Remember when the raiders came and took all of your food, how hungry you were, how you almost died, alone and wasted in your shelter….”

“I said shut up,” she yells, throwing herself back violently, but the anger is quickly hedged out by desperation. The shadowed Rey stumbles backward, but Rey holds tight to her, not letting her fall. “I can kill them all,” she screams. “If they come back now, I can kill them! And no one will be able to make me feel small again! No one can make me feel helpless ever again!”

She screams like a child into the night. Rey’s heart stutters, words that she had screamed inside herself, but never allowed herself to speak into the light. “I’m sorry,” says Rey. “I’m sorry I tried to bury you. I’m sorry I pretended that you weren’t mine to care for.”

Rey raises her hand, softly and tenderly, and cups the cheek of the woman, who is still a child, in front of her. “I’m so so sorry.” Rey inclines her head, softly, touching her forehead to the others. “I need you to,” she says. “I need you to do what I am about to do. I can’t do it on my own.” She can feel it as it happens, the uncoiling of anger, the release of grief, the peace of acceptance and longing.

Of shadow being wedded to light.

Of one caring for the other, rather than rejecting.

The sum of who she is becoming one.

She is a nobody.

She is an orphan.

She is a scavenger.

She is a woman in love.

She is born of both darkness and light- and neither controls her.

She is a Jedi.

And she is not.

She is a Sith.

And she is not.

And none of those give her a place in this story.

She has a place in the story because she is. Because she is Rey and she is here, and to do what she is about to do, she suddenly knows that she can be no one else.

She looks up and finds that she has arrived, beneath the shadow of a Gate cast against the red sky- a Gate with six pillars with writing scrawled across them. She cannot read any of the Sith writing, but one of them she knows is for her, one of them is the pillar of House Palpatine.

She will not be kept out. This Gate belongs to her in part, and it will not stay closed for her.

She reaches down and picks up a rock, jagged and sharp and drags it across her palm, drawing out blood. She approaches the pillar that bears her name and raises her palm to smear her blood on it. 

“I am Rey Palpatine,” she calls out as her blood seeps into the stone, the toll and key for her entrance. No more burying. No more running. If Rey Palpatine is the only way she can save Ben, then Rey Palpatine she will be. “And I demand entrance in Chaos.”

As the blood soaks into the pillar, the gate quakes and moans in protest, but it opens, slowly. She walks past the pillar, into Chaos, into Hell, as the last traces of blood disappear.

It’s his blood, and it’s hers.

And, for the first time, the thought makes her smile.

The blood of Palpatine- and she would use it to save the last Skywalker.


	12. The Blood of a Scavenger and an Empress In Her Veins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey enters the Citadel.

This place, like the Gate, seems to open for her- welcoming her as though she belongs, as though the place in some way belongs to her, is meant for her, has been waiting breathlessly for her arrival. Something surges in the dead soil beneath her feet, something like the last stubborn gasps of life, begging to be revived.

This place- this dimension, this plane of existence, it’s real and not real- physical and disincarnate. She can feel it bleeding beneath her, sick and desolate, and ravaged by the dark side. It’s the feeling of imbalance, magnified. But there’s a still-beating heart at its center, desperate for air. She can feel it inside and outside as she strides toward the center of it all- it’s calling to her, pulling on her power and tugging on her Force energy.

But she does not fight it. She follows it, letting it guide her, letting the dark and light propel her, letting neither rule her. When she reaches the Gates she passes several beings, creatures unknown to her, but from whom she felt that same desperate call of life, longing to be freed. They are a part of this place, hearts made of the same stuff.

None of them look at her, none of them are phased by her. In fact, they all seem to be in a daze, as if everything but the last drop of energy had been drained from them.

“It’s you.” Rey spins around, ready to fight, to strike, to do battle for entrance, but no one is there. “Down here," a small voice adds.

Rey looks down at the child in front of her and immediately lowers her saber. “Oh, hello,” she says. She kneels down beside the child. She thinks, suddenly of BB8, how this whole journey began, when she knelt in the sand with that little droid and everything changed. “Do you know me?”

She shrugs. “Well,” she says. “I don’t know you, but based on the name that Ben kept muttering during his nap I’d assume you’re Rey.” 

Rey’s heart leaps in her chest and she fights the urge to touch the child, to grab her shoulders in excitement. “You…you saw Ben,” she whispers, as though, until now, she had been waiting for the floor to fall out beneath her, to prove that this whole thing had been nothing but a waste of time and a cruel hope.

“Yeah,” says the child, with a nod and wide smile. “He helped me get back to my mother. Then he was supposed to go to the Gate, but…” she looked back toward the wall, toward the fortress behind it. “Then he came back.”

“Why?”

The child held out her foot and wiggled it. “He thought, maybe he could set us free.”

Rey breathes out, slowly. “You’re a prisoner.”

“A slave, we all serve the Master.”

“And when did Ben go,” she asks.

“I don’t know,” the child says. “I don’t really know what that means.”

“An hour? Two hours?”

The child looks at her apologetically. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Was it long ago,” she asks. “Did you speak to him recently.”

“We slept once since speaking,” said the child.

Rey nods and stands up. “All right,” she says. “Thank you, that helps.”

The child nods. “You’ll save him right,” she says, wringing her hands. “He’s my…he’s my friend and I don’t want him to get hurt because he tried to help us. He even helped me pick my own name. It’s Kid. I’m Kid. That’s my name and Ben helped me pick it so I hope you can save him, and I hope the Master doesn’t hurt him, but the Master is powerful and scary and…”

Rey smiles, as much as she can in the moment with every thought and fear and thrill racing in her mind- _Ben’s alive. Ben is here. Ben may be in trouble._ “Kid,” Rey interrupts. She holds out her hand to the child, open-palmed and non-threatening. Kid, tentatively lays her hand in Rey’s, and Rey tightens her grip. “I didn’t come all this way to lose him now. I will save him. I will.”

The child looks at her for a moment, something between a question and realization, as if seeing something she recognized for the first time. “Okay,” Kid says with a nod, looking at the fortress. “He’s in there somewhere. But if the Master has him then I don’t know…” Kid looks down and shakes her head.

Rey nods in understanding, but she does not consider it. She does not consider for a moment that the Force would have brought them both this far for her to lose him now. Her faith in the Force has been shaken, her faith in the Jedi, in all of it, but she still has hope, a sliver but it’s there.

It can’t have been for nothing.

Him.

Her.

They.

It can’t have all been for nothing.

Rey looks down at Kid once more and offers her a small, conspiratorial smile, then she turns back toward the fortress and she continues toward the opening. She walks forward, but she can hear Kid following shyly behind her.

###

Sorsuz is not afraid. She has never been afraid in her life. She is too powerful, too patient, too brilliant to be afraid of anyone getting the upper hand. _This_ place is hers; she knows its every thought. She feeds it and it, in turn, feeds her with the souls of the damned and the dark. Sustaining her.

She is not afraid because she has lived a thousand years and will live a thousand more.

She is not afraid because she is the sum of all the Sith. She has made the Sith immortal in this place.

But why, she wonders, does she feel the shift in the earth, its center tilting ever so lightly, ears turning, almost imperceptibly toward a new power. She can feel the soil groaning beneath her.

 _Another_ , she wonders curiously. _Could it be?_

She had ravaged Solo’s mind and saw hints of the woman- the woman he believes will find him.

But the woman is a nobody.

A Scavenger.

Strong in the Force, no doubt, but still a nobody.

And yet…

Sorzus moves to the window and peers down into the courtyard around her Citadel. The woman, Rey- if she remembers right- the name so loud in her prisoner’s mind, his memories soaked in her. As the woman passes into the Citadel, below her window, something unfamiliar and inexplicable passes through Sorsuz.

When this woman, this Rey, this nobody, drags her eyes slowly up the walls of her fortress, Sorzus must forcibly keep herself rooted in her spot. For the first time in her life she must fight the urge to hide herself away. She is certain, for a moment, clear and true, that when she looks into this woman’s eyes, she will see her own demise.

And as quickly as it comes, it goes replaced once against by her own vengeful resolve and unshakeable arrogance. She is Sorzus Syn, the Sith'ari. Lord of the Sith. And no low mortal, no matter how powerful, will ever defeat her, not in a world built from her own blood and bones.

She is the Master and this world, and all who dwell in it, are her slaves

###

Rey feels powerful. It’s not a drunken power or a desperate power, but one born of a calm storm, of peace and passion, both somehow resting easy in her chest. This place, somehow, is filling her up, the seams of her straining against the growing Force inside of her.

There was once a time when she would have been frightened by the sensation, but everything feels different now. She was so afraid, afraid of herself, afraid of what she could be, afraid of what she had been, and somehow, now, unburdened by that fear, everything is clearer.

Now she lets that force guide her steps.

She can feel the sensation stronger now of something tugging at her life, at her strength, but she holds tight to it. It belongs to no one but her. Her eyes begin searching out the source of the vacuum only to be interrupted by the sound of someone calling her name. Rey looks over her shoulder at Kid, who is still standing on the other side of the entrance, cowering as though she were about to be scolded for even coming this close to the Citadel.

“Rey,” she whispers and points up to the sky. Rey turns and looks past the spire of the Citadel, as two winged creatures emerge from behind it. They are long and serpentine, tongues whipping violently, dripping with boiling venom. Rey readies herself as they screech and descend toward her, mouths opening for her. The first one thrashes its tongue at her. She waits until it is close enough, until it is inches from her face before she swings her saber through the fleshy meat, sending the flaccid end flopping at her feet. The creature screams and rears its head back away, but it does not discontinue its descent.

Rey closes her eyes and breathes in, letting the Force propel her up as she leaps into the air, brandishing the other end of her saber, catching the wing of the creature, tearing through the flesh there. This time the creature flails away from her with its one good wing, screeching into the air. Rey lands and looks up as it retreats, unevenly back to where it came. The second is close to her now, its fangs bared and dripping.

Rey does not want to kill it. She hopes, very much, that she will not have to kill anything- as she can feel, even as she did from those gathered outside of the Citadel walls, that even these creatures are in pain, even in these creatures are suffering and held against their will.

So she does not strike a killing blow.

She extends her hand and closes it into a tight fist. The creature freezes mid-air, thrashing and flapping wildly to escape the grip of the Force around it, but Rey holds tight. She rears back her arm as though about to throw a punch, and then the creature flies backward through the air, landing somewhere far beyond the Citadel.

Rey hopes it does not return, that there is somewhere it can run to.

She continues to move toward the Citadel when the second line of defense marches out from its arches. They are not creatures so feral as the ones who first attacked her, they are humanoids, strong in the dark side of the Force, armed and strategic as they gathered around her, encircling her like prey.

She can feel the power around them, not just in their weapons but in their senses, in their movement, in the swing of their axes. She leaps back as a blade swings for her. She spins to avoid another behind her.

She doesn’t want to kill anyone.

But she will if it means getting to Ben.

She shakes the ground beneath the feet of three in front of her, creating a shockwave that throws them back, creating an opening in their perimeter for her to escape. She kneels and rolls out of reach of an ax and frees herself from the circle so her back is pressed against the wall. It only provides momentary relief as they advance on her.

She feels the strength of their own Force energy, shoving back against her, trying to lower her arm and stay her saber. She breathes in and searches her new self- the self of darkness and light, the self that is powered by the strength of this place, by the concentrated energy at this Citadel.

There is nothing good here, only darkness, but she wonders when darkness does not rule when it clasps to light, what new Force may emerge from that. So she opens herself up, and something about the darkness here calls to the blood in her veins.

Something familiar.

She remembers the Jedi texts, the warning about the dark side and how to fight it. But it was always from a posture of fear, never of curiosity, never a wondering of how those things may be used for light and life. She is certain that many Jedi would call that thinking dangerous, a slippery slope. But there is so much now that doesn’t make sense, so much now she is sure the Jedi, for all their wisdom, did not understand.

She does not want to kill these slaves either, but she does need an advantage when she is so outnumbered.

 _Odojinya_.

Something inside of her, something of the energy that is pouring into her now from this spirit of this place, screams it into her being. She does not know it, but something inside of her does- something she is carrying inside of her knows it well.

 _“A web of dark energy, designed to catch its prey and sever their connection to the Force,”_ it had said in the Sacred Text.

Evil.

Dark side.

But yet…

She calls on the incantation- utters it in her spirit, the spirit that somehow carries in it the power of a Sith, the power that brought her into Chaos, a power that, by itself may overtake her and drown her, but in partnership with the light that is every bit as strong inside of her, maybe she can use it to save everyone- even her enemies.

She can almost see the strands of the dark side lashing out coiling around her assailants. They growl and hiss and trudge toward her as if caught in sinking sand. She closes her eyes and digs deeper into herself and looks unflinchingly into the darkness.

She calls on it again and again.

It is hers too, and she will not be afraid of herself any longer.

She pulls and pulls on the thread, catching them in her web.

“Rey!”

Kid’s voice breaks through and Rey opens her eyes as an axe swings toward her, freezing inches away from her neck. The creatures are frozen in front of her, enmeshed in a web of Force energy, unable to move forward. Rey steps out of reach of the ax.

It’s painful, what’s happening, as the darkness feeds on their Force connection, slowly severing them from it. But they are alive. She can feel from them that they know nothing but to serve their Master, their desire or will has little to do with it.

She steps around and through them, weaving in and out of her assailants until she is at the Citadel again. She still feels the tug on her own power, some great source seeking to suck the spirit from her, feeding off of the Force here.

The sickness begins here; the source of the imbalance is _here_. But, she knows now, that it has not been contained here. Something here, she knows, has disrupted the Force everywhere, the natural way of life and death has come to a halt here, poisoning everything around it. Breaking the balance in a way far beyond what any of them had every imagined. 

“Kid…” she calls. Rey turns to see Kid lingering at the wall, still reluctant to pass into the Citadel. Rey follows the pull that is happening on her own dark energy, her eyes landing on the tip of the spire where a yellow jewel winks against the sky.

Like a lightening rod, ready to capture anything that passes it.

“What is that?”

“I don’t know,” yells Kid from the wall. “I have never been in the Citadel. Why?”

Rey looks at Kid for a moment and then back at the amulet that shines there. “It’s important,” she says. “It’s…it’s everything.” She doesn’t know what she means when she says it, except that she knows it’s true. “I need to get to it and destroy it.”

The longer she looks at it, the truer it becomes. It’s a thing of pure darkness and evil, she can feel the tortured scream of souls from inside of it, pulling on her, beckoning her to join them.

“Well, you are much more clever than the man you’ve run into hell to save.”

Rey sees her eyes first, pinpricks in the darkness of the Citadel, she emerges, towering and powerful, seemingly unphased by the chaos at her door.

“But,” says the woman, the Master. “He is awful pretty is he not.”

Rey steps back and ignites her saber.

“Oh please…” the saber is suddenly ripped from her grasp and flies, effortlessly to the open palm of the woman. “No need for such barbarism.”

She tosses it aside. Rey fights the urge to run to retrieve it, certain that this woman would be able to overpower her. Here, Rey is not certain if her strength can rival the woman in front of her. She walks toward Rey and observes her curiously. Rey tries to jerk back but finds herself frozen in place, this time the darkness being turned back on her, trapping her in place.

“Do you know who I am,” the woman asks as she circles Rey. Rey strains and jerks, her body beginning to panic against the invisible restraints. “No need for that,” the woman added on dismissively, before pausing her circling and standing in front of Rey.

“The Master,” answers Rey through gritted teeth. “The Master who has enslaved and sickened this place.”

She scoffs. “My dear, I created this place,” she says. “Is it not mine to do what I wish? I am Sorzus Syn, the great Sith alchemist, and no matter how powerful you are…”

Rey’s lips curl into a sneer and she thrashes again. “Where is Ben Solo!?”

She can feel it when she screams, when she speaks his name, she can feel the Force freeze and shudder around her, forming cracks of weakness, invisible to even Sorzus.

“Oh isn’t love grand,” Sorzus purrs. “I must say I’m impressed that you came for him. He said you would and believe me when I say I probed his mind thoroughly and it was awash with you.”

She thrashes against her cage again, this time she feels pieces of it break away, she can move her arm now, but she keeps them still, waiting for her moment, waiting for a bit more freedom.

She thinks of him. She thinks of Ben.

Of his smile.

Of his hair.

Of his eyes.

Of the way he ripped that damn necklace from around her neck.

Of the feel of him behind her in the throne room, strong and secure and solid, armed with his saber and some half-baked plan to get both of them out alive.

Of the way he dragged himself out of the pit for her.

All for her.

Always for her.

She thinks of him and she is powerful. And she wonders at the way the Jedi’s balked against attachment when the strength of their bond fills her again.

Rey meets her red gaze and can’t help the smirk that twitches in the corner of her mouth. “Well,” she says. “Here I am, Sorzus. And I’m going to free him. I’m going to free your slaves, and then I’m going to free this planet.”

“I find that hard to believe when you can’t even move.” Sorzus raises her hand and strokes her cheek, more sinister than Snoke, more powerful than Palpatine. But she is not the same Rey she was in the throne room. She feels herself be lifted up into the air by Sorzus. “Now you will show me who you are,” whispers Sorzus. “Then I will harvest your blood, your bones, your marrow, and when you are nothing but a husk I will strip you of your spirit, and you, my sweet girl, will be my slave.”

Rey is ready this time as the dark reach of Sorzus’ fingers find her psyche.

But this time she is not so easy a target. This time Rey pushes back. She can feel the momentary cold-blooded panic as Sorzus struggles to reach her. She can feel Sorzus’ confusion when Rey smirks down at her. And she can feel Sorzus’ white-hot rage when Rey throws herself forward, freeing herself from Sorzus’ hold. Rey falls to the ground and rolls back to her feet as Sorzus reaches out to her, ready to freeze her again, but Rey gets there first, and this time it is Sorzus who can’t move.

“Who are you,” Sorzus says, her whisper almost a trembling scream.

“What’s the matter,” asks Rey. “You couldn’t read it inside my head?”

Sorzus screams and breaks free, calling an ax from one of her fallen warriors to her hand. Rey bends backward and calls her own weapon, the blades of the axes sending sparks as they crash together with horrifying Force.

Yes, the woman may be more powerful than Snoke or Palpatine.

 _But then again_ , Rey thinks. _So am I._

###

Ben can feel her too, the moment she passes through the Gate and something sparks in him that had only been a whisper before. He tries desperately to call a weapon, something to cut through the bars of his cell, but he finds, no matter how hard he grasps, that connection has been blocked, something in the cell obscuring his connection to the Force.

But he needs to escape.

He has to get to her.

He can’t leave her to face Sorzus alone.

But he can still smell the burning of his own skin from the mere seconds ago when he tried to reach through, to see if he could connect with the Force if one part of him was outside the cell, long enough to call anything to his hand to help him escape.

It can’t end here. Not when they are so close, not when he can feel the gaping wound in his spirit begin to stitch back together with her being so close.

He stands again, ready to throw himself at the bars, to see again if he can reach out further, harder to see if there is some way to escape. He staggers forward and then hurls himself at the bars, ready to shatter the whole Citadel if it means he can get to her.

“Stop you idiot!”

The familiar voice stalls him inches away from the sizzling bars.

“Kid!? What the kriff are you doing here?”

She is dragging something behind her, something too big for her little hands to wrap around.

“I’m saving you, Ben Solo!”

She struggles to hold the saber up, igniting it. She sways under the weight of it when she brandishes it, stumbling backward as she swings it messily toward the bars.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Kid looks at Ben through the bars.

“Why," she asks, confused. 

“Because you’ll cut your own damn head off,” says Ben. “Just lay it by the bars and I’ll reach through.”

His voice is ragged and cross, but it’s only because he can’t feel all the things that he is feeling. When in reality he could kiss Kid's beautiful little face and hug her and tell her that she’ll never be a slave again and that she can be a damn princess of the galaxy if they get through this. 

“Fine,” she sighs. “Your girlfriend looked a lot cooler with it anyway.” She turns it off and lays it as close to the cell as she can without touching the current.

“Did you...” asks Ben, his voice cracking. “Did you see her?”

Kid smiles, slyly and Ben is reminded again that there is not much difference between children across the galaxy. “Oh yeah,” she says. “I saw her.”

She’s alive.

She’s here.

She came for him.

Force knows why, but she came for him.

He reaches through the bars and the currents surge through his body again, but the pain doesn’t throw him back this time, it doesn’t blacken his eyes, he focuses on the saber. When he jerks it back to his side of the prison he falls backward momentarily, catching his breath.

“She’s alright?”

“She’s all right,” says Kid. “She’s real, real pretty Ben.”

Ben laughs, softly, and goes back to his knees, looking down at the saber in his hand. Her new saber.

Double-sided.

Still at heart, a little scavenger.

“She says we need to get the amulet,” says Kid. “She says it needs to be destroyed.”

“What amulet?”

“The one at the top of the Citadel.”

Ben stands and ignites the saber, and motions for Kid to back away from the bars.

“All right,” he says. “If that’s what she says we need to do, that’s what we’ll do.”

He knew better by now than to question a scavenger with the blood of an empress.


	13. The Rise of the Sith'ari

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eeek this is the second to last chapter- with a possible epilogue! Thank you so much for reading and go on this journey with me :) It's been helpful for me in making peace with TROS!

_What is the balance?-_ Rey wonders, as a shooting pain runs through her forearm as Sorzus’ ax meets hers. She has never fought someone so powerful, so strong, so fueled by darkness, by something beyond comprehension. The Force of this place bends around Sorzus, manipulated and enslaved to her.

Here, Rey realizes, Sorzus is stronger than her. And, this time, there isn’t a host of Jedi coming to her aid.

Rey bends back as Sorzus swings out with her own weapon. She can feel the rush of hair as it passes across her face.

Rey is strong here too. She knows that. Stronger than she has ever been. But still, …she is not as strong as Sorzus; the weight of Sorzus’ power is overwhelming, caught in it is the power to create, destroy, and preserve life…no, not life, but something like life- some perverse imitation of it. 

And Rey can feel herself weakening in her body and soul. It is not that she is tired, her body is alert and willing to fight. Her body could go a few more hours, but her soul...her soul is draining. The darkness and light inside of her is now pouring from her as though from an open wound, now that she is focused on fighting Sorzus and not combatting the pull of whatever it is in this place that gives Sorzus her life force.

Sorzus swings again, this time Rey stumbles and she is not able to clear the blade entirely as it slices through her tunic and grazes the skin of her stomach. Nothing vital is hit but Sorzus winks at her, bloodthirsty and malicious- a fuel and fire alight in her glowing eyes.

_This can’t be the truth of the Force, can it?_

Rey clasps her hand over her wound briefly, checking to make sure it is not deeper than it feels and Sorzus takes her momentary distraction as a chance to reach out with a first and punch at the air, the ground beneath Rey shudders and tremors, knocking her to her knees.

_It can’t be that the darkness will always win, can it? That there is no space for both because the light will always be fighting a foe more powerful than it, struggling for a leg up in any given moment?_

Rey spins on her knees under Sorzus swing, until she is on her feet behind her. Rey swings out with her own ax catching Sorzus in the back. The woman lets out a momentary sound of pain but recovers quickly. But the sight of Sorzus blood does not excite Rey in the way her own had Sorzus, it did not ignite a flame of confidence.

But Rey felt herself weakening further. Every time she comes close, or draws blood, she feels her own power waning. 

_What is balance? If the only power- at the end of the day – are tools of evil? Hate. Violence without purpose. Killing instead of being killed._

_“Look deeper,”_ a voice, both familiar and unfamiliar, one she had heard on Exegol and one she had heard in Anakin’s memories. _“Look deeper, there is another way.”_

The creature had scoffed at her, at the way she spoke of the Jedi and the Sith, of darkness and light. He had laughed at the binary of it all. But yet Sorzus is beating her. Rey is scrambling to stay alive.

_If the light isn’t stronger... if the dark isn’t stronger..._

_If together, they are still being beaten- then what is the point._

_What is the answer?_

_Even if she wins- even if she disarms her- would she then have to kill her? And if she does, if that is the only way to win…then what is the point of the Force, what does it offer that no Starfleet, or Death start cannot already offer?_

_What is the point of an of it if it is just an endless cycle._

Rey feels an invisible force like a battering ram slam into her stomach, sending her flying back into the wall that surrounds the Citadel. She groans and coughs as she struggles to replace the air that had been knocked from her.

She looks up just as Sorzus leaps cross the space between them, like a bird of prey. She lands on Rey, straddling her. Rey’s fingers close back around her weapon just in time to block the blade just inches from her own neck. Sorzus grins, her canines flashing. Rey growls through her own teeth, gritted so tight she is afraid she may snap them out of her own mouth.

_This can’t be the way of balance. Getting ride of darkness is not the answer, but nor can it be allowed to be so powerful, that the tiniest misstep sends one spiraling both into complete power and complete damnation._

She wants to scream it into the void of space. If now, she is not strong enough to face Sorzus- as a Palpatine, as an empress, as a Scavenger, as all the Jedi and all the Sith, then what chance did they have to stop the sickness of this place, of the galaxy.

Then she sees something, the quickest flash of movement over Sorzus’ shoulder. Something, someone, climbing out of a window at the top of the Citadel.

A familiar someone.

A familiar black sweater.

A familiar reckless reach.

A familiar feeling.

###

Ben can see her and for a moment, it’s all he can think about. He can see her from here, from the top of the Citadel. She is alive, still. Sorzus has not won. Rey is every bit as powerful and magnificent and human as she had ever been, and she is here. 

Rey- somehow both the feral scavenger and powerful empress at once as she battles with Sorzus. She is alive and whole. He almost loses his grip, he almost shouts and falls when he sees Sorzus blade almost cut through Rey.

“Be careful, Ben,” screams a voice from inside the tower.

Ben is standing on the ledge of the window, his hands curled up under the top of it, keeping himself secure and in place as he surveyed the tip of the Citadel, the formation of the spire, and the distance of the amulet. 

He looks back inside the window at Kid, who was standing in the middle of the room, taking his eyes of Rey. He can’t look at her, not right now. Not when her life, and so many others, depend on him focusing on what’s in front of him.

He can’t think of Rey fighting alone, and how badly he wants to stand with her.

Right now, this is the best way he can do that He can do exactly what she said needed to be done. Destroy this damn thing, whatever it is.

“Kid,” he says. “I want you to go, to hide. If this doesn’t end well then Sorzus can’t know that you helped me.”

Kid crossed her arms and shook her head.

“No way, Ben Solo,” she says. “We’re gonna win! And we’re gonna be free.”

Ben rolled his eyes and looked back at the top of the Citadel. “Yeah,” he mutters. “We’re going to win as long as I don’t fall off this damn thing.”

The rounded dome on which the spire is perched is smooth, with nothing to grab onto. He’ll have to jump and reach and hope he gets his hand on the spire. He can feel the concentrated power of the dark side, rushing toward the amulet, rushing out of him.

“Okay,” he says to himself. “You were thrown down a pit in Exegol and dragged your ass out, you can jump a few feet.”

He spares himself one more look at Rey and swallows hard. He needs to stay focused and to remind himself why he cannot fail. He sees Rey get thrown back hard into the wall, and that’s all the motivation he needs. He squats low, still clinging to the window, and then flings himself out and up, away from the security of the window, and into the open air of this hell of a planet.

The hell that Rey had stormed into for him.

His hands find the base of the spire and he clings to it with all of his strength.

###

_“Six there were for generations of Jedi. The seventh, is not well-known. Powerful form is it. Deadliest of all. But dangerous it is, for its master as well as its opponent. Few have studied it."_

There was seventh form, she had read in the Jedi texts.

And at the heart of that seventh form is passion, forbidden by the Jedi. 

_There is no passion, only peace._ The credo of the Jedi. 

It’s what makes this seventh form so dangerous, especially for someone like her- who lives so close to the dark and the light. The power behind this form is passion, single-minded and powerful- but this time, not to destroy what she hates, but to save…

Him.

He is pulling himself up toward the spire

_“Look deeply…there is another way.”_

She loves Ben Solo.

Between life and death- connecting life and death, giving meaning and purpose and pain to life and death- is love.

Between selfishness and selflessness- loving selfishly and protecting selflessly- is love.

Love lives in the grey- in the seeing of all the good and all the bad and loving anyway.

It is passion. And it is peace.

Attachments lead to weakness and vulnerability. The Jedi were right.

Attachments lead to strength beyond anything that could be imagined, by the Sith or Jedi.

Rey pushes out, with all her strength, with all his strength that he has given her. With the strength of those she loves and those who love her. Sorzus flies off of her, and Rey is on her feet.

Rey swings downward toward Sorzus' shoulder. Sorzus swings wildly to block her away.

Rey lets her.

She just needs time.

She needs Ben to do what she knows he will do.

###

Ben could feel the shift in her when it happened. She is stronger. Freer. And he feels it too. Her strength is his, and his strength his hers. He had thought there was a limit- that she would be stronger if he gave it all to her.

But he was wrong.

There is no balance there.

Just more death.

Just more loss.

Just more grief.

They give to each other, and of each other, giving and getting more in return, and both are made stronger. The Force is not so limited or finite as Jedi or Sith would have it.

He dangles over the dome with nothing but open space beneath him. He tightens his grip on the spire and pulls his body weight up the side of the dome. He lets go with one hand to reach higher up the spire, and he pulls himself up still higher. Over and over. 

He feels sick. The amulet, whatever it is, is pulling mercilessly from his life Force and in return projecting darkness and pain. The closer he gets, the more he can feel it.

Whatever it is, it’s a prison.

A place of intense pain and suffering.

He had thought that this place was Sith Hell, but the closer he gets to the amulet the more he senses it. This place is not Sith Hell, it’s just where she keeps Sith Hell. He can feel their spirits, their voices, their screams as they desperately claw at his own life force.

He is climbing slower now, every part of him screaming in protest as he approaches the glinting, green jewel. But he is prepared for this.

He had climbed out from under Snoke; out of the prison of Kylo Ren; out of the pit.

For her, yes. But also for himself, to be the man he should have always been, and that man, Ben Solo, can do this. He won’t fall.

###

Sorzus is strong in the Force. She can feel it as easily as she feels the movement of her own blood in her veins- she manipulates it with ease. In her hands, it becomes a weapon to be reckoned with, stronger than it could ever be on its own.

But there’s something happening here. Something happening in the woman whose advancing on her, with such fury and such speed that Sorzus finds herself scrambling to respond. There is something powering her, something behind her that Sorzus cannot understand, that she cannot make sense of, that she cannot name but that she can feel.

It gives power to her movement, preciseness to her strikes. Almost as though she can see everything Sorzus is going to do next, predict her attacks and counterattacks. The balance, once again, shifts in the direction of her opponent.

The dark side is a fickle thing, she knows this to be true; a thing that flocks toward power and strength, and for so long it was Sorzus unchallenged. Sorzus the Sith’ari.

###

_“The Sith’ari will be free of limits.”_

_###_

Beyond just light and dark.

Beyond just simple right and wrong.

Beyond just easy right and wrongs.

Beyond Sith and Jedi.

Everything inside of her gathers for the purpose of saving what she loves; setting him, and this place free.

###

_“The Sith’ari will lead the Sith and destroy them.”_

###

Ben raises his sand shakily toward the amulet- pushing back against its trembling defenses, holding onto the last bit of life in him as he does. It fights back, pushing him away like a mighty wind trying to blow him from the top of the Citadel.

But he holds on.

He reaches and his hands clasp over the smooth surface of the amulet. He feels as though it sets his whole arm on fire when he does, but he holds tight. It all but thrashes in his palm as if it knows what is about to happen. But he holds tight and looks down at Rey and Sorzus.

She is pushing back on Sorzus- pushing her into the shadow of her own home. She strikes with the same fury that had on Starkiller base, with the purpose that she did in the throne room. She fights like he hasn’t seen her fight in a long time.

Like she knows she’s going to win.

She’s just waiting for him.

“REY!”

He yells her name, loud and clear; declaration, a statement, a prayer. She looks up at him, and his heart jumps in his chest because he thought she’d never look at him again, that he would never again feel the rush of being seen by her.

He slams the amulet onto the tip of the spire, plunging the tip into its heart. The explosion is fierce as a wave of screams and tormented souls are released all at once; set free from their captivity.

###

Rey lowers her ax and steps away from the trembling pile in front of her. When the amulet breaks, so does Sorzus. Her skin begins to crack, the unnatural source that had been keeping her alive violently ripped from her.

Sorzus stumbles away from Rey as her own arm trembles under the weight of her weapon. She looks at her hands, lively and full one moment, and her eyes widen in fear as they shrivel and curl in on themselves before her very eyes. She whimpers and falls, weakly to her knees before dropping violently to her side, curling in on herself as pain ravages her body in a way Rey is certain the woman has not felt in a long time. 

Rey drops her own weapon to the ground and she steps a little closer, close enough to hear another whimper come from under the cloak. Rey steps toward her and Sorzus curls in on herself even more, kicking at the ground as though to create distance between them.

Rey steps closer again and kneels beside Sorzus.

She may have toted lofty ideas of science and progress; continuing the Sith forever, making them stronger and immortal. But as Rey places her hand on the woman’s shoulder, now just loose skin and weak bones, she could feel the truth. That, like so many before her, Sorzus was afraid; afraid of death, afraid of what would come next. Sorzus isn’t a monster now. She’s a mortal, and she’s afraid. She’s afraid of the thing that so many have gone through such great lengths to avoid; that she had sacrificed everything to escape.

Rey sits down beside her.

Of course, she’s afraid. She’s alone. Rey gently turns Sorzus over, her haggard, sinking face hollow and empty and she inhales raggedly, the pain of every breath evident on her face. Sorzus’ eyes, now grey and dimming, fall on her, and Rey sees a momentary seize of panic and fear in their depths. Almost instinctively, acting on some part of herself that she cannot deny, even in the face of someone like Sorzus. She does not turn away, she does not stand to leave the woman to her fate, instead, Rey holds her tighter. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s okay. I know you’re scared. But this is what’s supposed to happen. It’s the way of the Force. You’ve made yourself sick, the planet sick, by trapping yourself here- by trapping the Sith here. It’s time…it’s time to go.” Sorzus breathes in, and her whole body shakes from the weight and strain of it. “But don’t worry. You’re not alone.”

Rey watches as Sorzus closes her eyes, as the toll of time and age come to claim it’s due. But Rey thinks, maybe, for the first time really, Sorzus feels a moment of not being afraid, even as her body turns to dust in Rey’s arm as she passes into whatever it is that comes next.

Rey isn't certain. But it must be better than this prison she had created for herself. 

Rey stands slowly, shakily, and looks around. She is surrounded by them, specters caught and trapped here by Sorzus- dark side users whose power Sorzus had harnessed to live- now set free. She is surrounded, but she is not afraid. They aren’t threatening her, they are waiting for her. Yes, they are dark siders, she can feel that but still- this is not the way. The dark and the light both belong to the force and this- she is certain- has tipped the scales toward the dark for too long- all of this power, all of this rage, all of this sickness, trapped here, building and simmering beneath the surface never returning to the source. It had to be released and set free.

“You’re no longer trapped here,” she says. “You have no master. Now go…go and be one with the Force.”

She can feel the relief, the freedom. She hears the sound of chains falling.

###

_The Sith’ari will raise the Sith from death and make them stronger than before._


	14. What She Deserves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey deserves her happy ending. Ben deserves his happy ending. Rey wants Ben, so Rey gets Ben!
> 
> This is my last chapter- with an epilogue on the way! It's pure fluff, and love, and tears, and hugging and I hope you love it. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading and going on this little healing journey with me.

Rey’s legs were quaking beneath her. She takes one step toward the Citadel and her right leg buckles. She wants to run but she doesn’t trust herself. She takes another step forward and she feels dizzy- with joy and disbelief, with trembling want and fear of that want.

It felt so far away and yet a few moments away that she had kissed him, that he had fallen in her arms and disappeared before her eyes. She had been powerless then to stop it, and now she is afraid to trust it- another step- she is too afraid to trust the shadow moving out from the arc of the Citadel- another step- she is too afraid to trust that what she had been afraid to let herself desire is taking shape before her eyes.

His future.

Her future.

Their future.

She’s not supposed to get it all. She is just a scavenger, a nobody from Jakku. She isn’t supposed to win the war and get her prince.

And yet… He steps out into the light, seeming more bright and vibrant than it had been when clouded by the thick, red clouds. He steps out with Kid on his hip, and she’s hugging him tight around his shoulder, her leg swinging freely, no longer weighed down by the metal cuff that had been there.

And she feels as though she is seeing him clearer than before- the collective weight of his story, who he had been, bringing to light things she had never known. Her story of him is no longer thin and fragile, it is firm and clear and taking shape before her with every step forward. But it isn’t complete either, she wants, and needs, more.

###

_She came for me._

It’s the only thought he can tease out from the tumbling and chaotic sounds inside of his head. He still cannot believe it. Kid is clinging to him and she holds out her foot, and shakes it at him, giggling and delighted. He nods and smiles. He is happy. She deserves to be set free. But still all he can think, as he descends the steps of the Citadel is:

_She came for me._

He is not surprised because of who she is. But he cannot understand it, because of who he is- who he has been. He is not that man anymore, but he is, some part of him will always be that man, and he wonders will he ever learn not to be afraid of it. But he feels lighter as he walks, as if something else is being set free here too, something being set right and some scales shifting.

_She came for me._

The very thought of it makes his heart squeeze in his chest. It’s overwhelming, to be loved like that. Because she comes for him over and over again. She crosses galaxies and hell to rescue him- every time.

_She came for me._

He stops, pausing before he steps out of the Citadel, before he turns toward the open arches of the courtyard. Kid gives him a gentle kick with her heel.

“What are you waiting for, Ben Solo? Your Rey is out there.”

He swallows. What could he say to her? What could he possibly say to her that could encompass all that she is to him? How can he ever begin to be as strong for her as she is for him?

“Come on,” she says again, with an exasperated sigh. “What? You think she crossed through hell and fought the devil because she _doesn’t_ like you? You’re not that dumb are you?”

Ben glares at her but finds her words break his self-conscious reverie. She’s right. He doesn’t understand it, not yet. It’s still hard to trust it. But she does love him. For now, at least, he won’t question why.

###

She takes another hurried step forward, but this time her legs completely give out and she crashes gracelessly to the ground. 

It’s too much; too much wanting, too much fear of losing it. It can’t be real. This is another dream, tricked from her mind- she is on the Falcon now, wrapped in his sweater, wringing every last bit of him out of it.

Ben eases Kid down to the ground, and in a few strides he’s on his knees in front of her, it’s not an elegant sweep or regal kneel but a broken, frantic fall. He doesn’t reach out and grab her right away, but his trembling hands hover over her shoulders as if he’s afraid to touch her and find that she is not really there. His eyes search her frantically for any sign of injury or harm.

She wants to speak, to assure him that she’s okay, but her words catch in her throat. She wants to kiss him, but all she can do is stare at his face. He’s so beautiful it makes her ache. She wishes, suddenly, that she had rehearsed what she would say and do; that she would have found some way to make it perfect. But all she can do is stare at him, gaping and grasping.

The first sound she can make is a shuddered sob. She had been on the verge for so long; tears had been bullying her eyes since he died in front of her, but she had kept them largely at bay, only sometimes waking to a soaked pillow- the only place that she could safely cry without it taking over the whole of her entirely.

But now he is here, and he’s in front of her and he’s staring at her looking every bit the idiot that she looks right now, both hopeless and helpless and overwhelmed.

And then the film breaks, and hot, scalding tears burn a path down her dirty face. She throws herself forward into him and he grasps at her like it means the difference of life and death. His forehead drops onto the crown of her head. It’s only a moment before she feels the tears falling from his eyes, over the tip of his nose and onto her forehead, and she knows that he is crying too, that he is shaking in her arms too.

There are no words that they can speak now, nothing that will mean more than just the fact that they are able to hold each other now, that they aren’t crying alone. She clings to him hard, with all the strength inside of her, as if she is somehow welding her soul back to together, replacing what was lost. Through her sobs, she takes long, hard gasps of air, as if she has just broken water for the first time in days.

His hand presses in hard on the back of her neck, holding her securely. She waits. She waits as long as she did on Exegol. Even a moment longer. She waits and then looks up, her face red, caked with dirt and blood and tears, and he’s still there.

She reaches up again and touches his face, this time lingering and searching, taking in what she had missed before when she was certain that she would have more time. Her palm passes over his cheek, his forehead, his lashes and his tears, the tips of her fingers trace over his lips. He doesn’t move, both hands hold her shoulders tight, rooting himself, but he doesn’t move, he doesn’t speak, he doesn’t lean into her touch or away.

She is about to speak. There is so much she wants to tell him, so much she wants to say…

###

He doesn’t move but lets her continue her gentle exploration of his features. He doesn’t want to move or even look at her, for fear of the intimacy that would be revealed there. So he continues to hold her, to feel the calloused skin of her fingers and palm over his face.

He feels his lip tremble again with emotion as she touches him; tender and compassionate, curious and awed.

He should be saying so much right now. He should be telling her how much he missed her, how grateful he is to her. He should be swearing his life to her now, but when he does open his eyes when her fingers freeze with his hair tangled between them. When he sees her fully and up close, she is…a beautiful, wonderful mess.

He doesn’t think he should say that; that her hair has fallen completely out of its buns, clinging to her neck and forehead. He doesn’t think he should tell her that her eyes, shining with brilliant tears, are red and blood-shot and betray the fact that she had not slept any more soundly than him in these past few days. He’s supposed to tell her how beautiful and perfect she is.

But he forgets and a small, gentle, happy laugh escapes his lips.

“Your clothes are dirty,” he says, playfully curling one of the ripped strands of her tunic around his finger. She pulls away slightly from him and looks down at herself and then laughs too. It had once been white, he’s certain. He saw her on the sand dusted planet of Pasana, the raging waves of the Death Star wreckage, and somehow, without fail, her white outfit escaped relatively unscathed. Now it was tattered, covered in blood and red earth, signs of the battle she had fought to get to him; signs of the battle she had fought to get what she wanted.

“I guess they are,” she says, looking back up at him, this time she’s smiling, though the tears are still falling.

His own hands move up to her face, feeling the heat of her skin beneath his palm and the sticky mixture of sweat, tears, and dirt. He leans in close to her and kisses her forehead. When he pulls away it’s just barely, just enough to speak.

“You came for me,” he says.

She raises an eyebrow, ever so slightly and she looks at him like maybe he’s a little bit of an idiot, but he doesn’t care. “Did you really ever think that I wouldn’t, Ben Solo?”

He considers this for a moment before he shrugs. “No,” he says. “I knew you would.”

She lets out a giddy laugh and he thinks, for a moment before he remembers Exegol, that he could die happy with that sound in his ears, and then sends a quick pleading prayer to the Force not to take the comment seriously. But it’s light and happy, and it’s the first time he has ever heard it. She throws her arms around his neck and hugs him, and it’s no longer the fearful, frantic touches of near loss or desperate hope.

It’s joy, and it’s light, and it’s her laughing in his ear. It’s her going up on her knees so she’s sitting a little higher so she can pull herself closer to him. It’s her lips in his hair, pressing a kiss to his head. It’s her pulling his face up so he’s looking up at her now, and a giddy exhale as she leans in toward him.

###

Rey can barely remember the kiss on Exegol, because it was replaced so quickly with pain. This time she took note, and she thinks, maybe, it’s even better now. After all, they each now had a whole kiss under their belt like the stunted adults that they are.

She remembered on Exegol, that Ben had held back. She could feel him holding back, not pressing too hard into her and not pulling her closer to him. This time he had deemed those restraint unnecessary/

She took note of everything this time, committing it to memory, the feel of his hand between her shoulder blades, pressing her closer to him, the way his whole hand nestled against her neck, his thumb grazing over the bottom of her throat, making her pulse quicken. The way he tasted, like dirt and sweat and tears, but most of all…like life.

When she pulls away, reluctantly. She steadies herself with a hand on his shoulder and she can’t hold back the ridiculous smile that she knows is spreading on her lips. She is filled with happiness and joy and excitement and energy.

There is so much she wants to do with him, so much left in their story that thinking about it makes her skin prickle with excitement.

“Ben,” she says, suddenly, gripping either shoulder and shaking him excitedly, remembering suddenly all that she wanted to say. “Ben, you had a grandmother, did you know that?” Her voice is high and frantic, and Ben is nodding almost absently with her as she speaks at a break-neck speed. “You had a grandmother and her name was Padme.” Her hands go up on either side of his face. “She was beautiful Ben and she was kind and smart.” She brushes stray hair from his forehead and kisses him there again. The story is in her, but it doesn’t belong to just her. It belongs to Ben, it’s a part of his story he never had the chance to know. “She was in love with Anakin and Anakin was madly in love with her. Did you know that?!” Before Ben can even respond she continues. She needs him to know, needs him to hear the story, needs him to know that she was always going to tell it, no matter what. “Anakin loved her. And she believed in him right into the end. She knew… she knew…”

She stops taking a breath and settled back down, lowering herself so she is eye-level with Ben. “I…I need you to know, Ben,” she says, touching her nose to his. “I need you to know that I was going to tell the story of Ben Solo, no matter what. I wouldn’t have let…” Rey wonders if she is going a little mad, with emotion, with exhaustion, maybe even with hunger and anxiety, because she suddenly wants to cry again. But Ben is looking at her with so much compassion, she thinks maybe everything she is feeling is okay, everything she is feeling makes sense, that maybe he understand the storm and the darkness and the light that is battling inside of her. “I wouldn’t have let Kylo Ren be what people remembered you for. I would have told people you had turned, that you had saved me. That you had…died for me.” Ben presses a kiss to her cheek, not interrupting her. “That you were good and brave.” He kisses her again on the other cheek. “I would have made sure the galaxy knew that you…” He kisses her chin. “That I…” He hovers over her mouth again, looking at her, waiting for her to finish. “That I loved…that I love you.”

And she would go to hell and back again over and over again for that smile, for the way he transforms in front of her when he hears those words from her. She would do this again and again, just to have this moment, again and again, just to see the way hearing those words from her makes him come alive, just to hear him whisper them back to her as he holds her close.

“I love you, Rey. I will love you forever.”

And she knows it’s true. And she trusts it with all of her heart.

###

When they stand, it is wobbly. They lean heavily into each other, each walking for the other, neither willing to not be holding the other. When they stand it’s to groups of beings gathering in the courtyard, looking up at the sky and at the Citadel.

The air, Ben notices, isn’t quite so thick or hot, and breathing is not so strained as it had been.

“Are you leaving now?”

Ben looks down at Kid who is standing in front of them, her hands behind her back, toeing the ground absently. Rey gently extracts herself from Ben as he goes back down to his knees in front of Kid.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we are leaving now.”

Kids lip trembles with a small pout. “But…you could…you could stay here, right? I think maybe…it’s going to be a nicer place now that the Mas…she’s gone.”

Ben wants to tell her he’ll come and visit. He wants to tell her that they can all leave with him. But he can’t, because this place is real and it isn’t, it exists and it doesn’t, a hell born from Sorzus’ mind, and he doesn’t know what will happen if Kid and her kin leave this place.

“Kid…” Ben and Kid both look up as her mother approaches them. “They have family, and friends, and work they have to do that they can’t do here.”

Kid sighs and her shoulders slump as she turns back to face Ben. “I know,” she says, her voice small. Ben reaches out a wipes a tear away from her eyes and she steps forward into him for a hug. “Thank you, Ben Solo,” she says. “Thank you- the chains are gone now like you said.”

Ben swallows hard. He’s not sure he has any tears left him, but he feels so much in that moment. There was once a time when he couldn’t imagine anyone loving him, wanting him, or missing him and now it is so hard to say goodbye to this little one who saved his life and helped him find his way home. But she is free now, and that thought brings him so much joy.

“I guess,” says Kid, pulling away and looking up at Rey and then back at Ben. “I guess she’ll do a good enough job taking care of you if I can’t be there.”

Ben laughs and takes her hand in his. He brings it up and presses a small kiss on it, and he wasn’t sure that Kid could blush until that moment when she squeaks and her pale skin turned pink. “Thank you, Kid,’ he says. “For everything.”

She nods and looks down at the ground, mumbling something to herself. When he stands Rey is looking at him with a small smirk.

“What,” he asks.

“Did you learn to make girls swoon in Prince school?”

“If you must know,” he says. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

She rolls her eyes and laughs as the two continue to walk away from the Citadel, back toward the Gate. 

“Do you think they’ll be alright,” he asks.

Rey holds him tighter as they walk. “Yes,” she says. “They’ll make this place their home.”

He hopes so. Because even if the planet was made by Sorzus Syn, with nefarious intent to harm and gather power, it doesn’t mean it’s beyond redemption. Kid was made by Sorzus too, and despite pain and slavery and suffering, she became someone who loved and felt compassion and kindness for a stranger.

They are almost out when they hear an excited squeal of delight, and Kid’s voicing calling people over. He looks over his shoulder one more. Several of the former slaves are crouched in the ground, looking at something that is springing up from the dirt

It’s small and green. It’s life.

Signs of weight being shifted, of balance being restored, of a galaxy being set right.


	15. Bring the Lost Ones Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! This is it friends. Thanks for going on this journey with me. I loved writing this, and cried my way through the ending because I'm sad it's over. Thanks for the love and support.

There’s a chill in the air as the sun sets and the wind skips across the water just outside and into the stone halls of the mausoleum. It carries with it the smell of wildflowers. He looks at Rey and he knows she can smell it too; he can see from the way her eyes light up just a little, they always do when they go somewhere green and lush with life.

And Ben likes that the warmth and the smell and the life touch everywhere on this planet- even this place where tears are wept and loved ones are encased in stone. It’s an open space and Ben thinks they did that on purpose so that the sound of laughter and the smell of wildflowers could find their way in.

He looks down at the marbled sarcophagus and reaches out a tentative hand toward it to trace the delicate symbol of Naboo, etched skillfully into the surface.

Finding out about her meant something that Ben could not quite name, as if she was some link to a past that, maybe, could have changed everything. He didn’t want to give himself too much credit or exonerate himself of his sins, but there was something about the way people spoke of her, the way she made her mark in history, with strength and stubbornness, with love and reconciliation, that made him wonder if that had not been his true legacy all along.

How different things may have been.

Though he does not linger in that thought, because he can feel Rey’s fingers slide between his own, offering strength and support, her own eyes fixed on the stain glassed window above her sarcophagus. She is portrayed there in soft colors that catch the dimming light of the orange sun.

He had seen renderings of her since, senate footage that had been recovered, but there is something about the way she looks in the window that makes him feel like she’s looking into his soul; a look of tenacious acceptance, not unlike the way she may have looked Anakin. He sees his mother in the soft glint of her eyes, he sees Luke there in her soft smile. He sees himself there, somehow.

He presses palm into the sarcophagus and he wonders if Anakin had ever made it here, even as Darth Vader. Had he ever come to the tomb to weep for what was lost? To break for his own shattered humanity? As he feels the sarcophagus, somehow, he is certain the answer is yes, that another hand had pressed here once before over this woman.

Connecting them across time and space, and not in the false way that Palpatine had made him believe he was connecting, but something true and pure.

“He loved her, even then,” Rey had said, from her encounter with the mask. “He loved her even as Vader, and I think that’s why Luke could save him.”

Ben believes it. Because he loved Rey, even as Kylo Ren, and because of that he could be saved, he could be moved toward compassion and strength and selflessness. It had not been her job to save him, but, still, he knows he could not have been saved if not for her.

When Ben looks up at Rey, there are tears shining in her eyes. That must mean…He reaches up and touches his own face, finding it wet with tears.

Of course.

One soul.

One soul across time and space.

He finds that they are healing slowly, steadily, the gentle stitching that comes with dragged edges that don’t quite match any longer. But it’s happening. He wakes, gasping sometimes in the night, the sensation of dying, of being ripped through dimensions, still somewhere in his skin. He had been broken at the panicked, frantic way she turned the Falcon inside out when she couldn’t find the ratty, disgusting sweater he had left behind. He wakes up easily, to the press of her ear against his mouth, listening for his breath.

They are healing, slowly, and together.

He smiles more than he ever thought that he would. And she is delighted to travel the galaxy with him, though she has yet to give up the captain seat except when she is tired. But he only pretends to care. He’s content to sit behind both her and Chewie, content to know that this is more than he ever dreamed he deserved.

He thinks, maybe, he’s starting to make friends; or, at least, most people are starting to see him as less of an enemy. Except for Commander Tico, he thinks maybe she is his friend. She smiles at him, at least, and scolds him when he calls her by her rank, and he thinks that means they might be friends.

Which is more than he ever could have hoped for.

They are healing, slowly, and together.

The galaxy is still shattered, by division and fear, by the remnants of the First Order, but it’s being knit together too. He had to give his whole life-force to bring Rey back to life, but there are enough people, pouring themselves into the broken galaxy, that it won’t be necessary to do again.

And he thinks now that even the darkness has been set free from its chains, life will do what it was always supposed to do. Life gives way to death to bring more life- life begets life. And he thinks, now that things are set right, if he ever had to pour his life force back into Rey, which he would do over and over again if he needed, it would not be so finite, just enough for one, but that the giving away would only create more.

Now that the balance is right.

Now that life and death are no ensnared by fear.

“Are you glad we were able to stop here,” asks Rey looking up at him. He nods and slowly pulls his hand away from the marble and turns to face her.

“Yes,” he says. “I am.”

Rey reaches up and cups his cheek in her hand. She loves to do that, he notices, to feel the indentation of his smile.

“Good,” she says. She looks over her shoulder at the waning sunlight. “We should get back to the Falcon and make sure they haven’t tied Chewie up and taken control of the ship.”

Ben snorts. “I’m sure they did. That Cayden is a real pain in the ass.”

Rey playfully shoves him as they walk back out of the mausoleum. “Whatever, he’s your favorite and you know it.”

That is true, and he does not deny it. When the Falcon comes into view he can see Chewie outside playing a game with four the children, all different ages, sizes, and species, but all children.

He allows himself to feel the pain of it. He does not linger there, because, as Rey tells him over and over again, it does no good to stay there- his guilt won’t set things right.

This will.

But they are all children, all separated from their families, pulled violently from their homes in the dead of night by people who were once children, similarly taken from their own homes to be subjected to brainwash and torture. All things he had been complicit in. While he cannot linger there, he has not done enough to not feel it when it comes, to not properly reckon with the pain he has caused.

But this is, he supposes, is a good start. As Ben and Rey get closer to the Falcon the kids take notice and wave happily at them. Cayden is not among them.

He’s the oldest of the group, he had been in the training the longest, his mind the most corrupted by the First Order brainwashing. Ben had found him at one of the training bases. The boy had been ready to fight, to kill. He had gotten a few good licks in too, Ben remembered. Rey lingers with Chewie and with the kids for a bit, joining in for the last bit of their game, but Ben continues toward the Falcon.

He finds Cayden in the cockpit of the Falcon, sitting in the captain’s seat and curiously taking in his surroundings. When Ben steps forward into the cockpit, Cayden jumps up, startled and goes straight as a board. Ben can see the fear flash in his eye, certain he has done something wrong, certain he is about to be punished.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” he says. “I was…” he looks around, and Ben waits, waits for Cayden to breathe, for his shoulders to fall, for him to take back control of his body from his learned behavior. Ben does not correct him, does not tell him to relax, he’s seen how far Cayden has come since they found him.

“You can sit if you want,” says Ben. “I can tell you how everything works.”

Cayden’s eyes widen in shock and maybe a little bit of delight, and he looks for a moment his age. Ben nods and sits in the co-pilot seat. He waits for Cayden to lower himself into the pilot’s seat, slow and uncertain.

Ben remembers sitting in that spot while his dad delighted him with adventures and stories. Ben goes through the different parts of the cockpit, throwing in his own occasional story and boast.

_“Do you know how fast this ship is…”_

Even as a child, Ben knew how fast the Falcon was, he had heard it many times, but he still liked it when Han told him anyway.

As Ben’s hands move over the different buttons and levers, the seats and the broken, busted bits that still need repairing, he wonders if Han ever knew it would be used for this. For carting First Order children all over the galaxy, returning them to their homes.

“What if she doesn’t want me,” Cayden had asked him, just a few nights ago when Ben had found him wide awake in the middle of the night, holding his knees tight to his chest. “What if I’m too…what if I’m too broken now…what if I can’t go back.”

_“Perhaps you intend to visit home? It has been some time…”_

_“No, not Hosnian Prime. I’m going somewhere else.”_

_“You can’t go back to her…not now. You’re like me.”_

Ben is deeply intimate with the feeling of not being able to return home- to the arms of a mother. He knows that fear and that it cannot be easily brushed away. He had sat with Cayden that night, asking him about his homeworld, his siblings, his parents, the games they played after a day’s work, what little snatches of light he could scrap together in his memory, asked him about the things he missed the most.

When the transceivers beeps on the Falcon Ben looks down at the message and smiles. Rose always pulls through for them.

“Hey Cayden,” he says, reaching past him to lay a projector in front of him. “Your mother sent us a message when she found out you were coming.”

He can see Cayden tense up even as he leaned forward excitedly. He turns on the hologram and then, slowly, steps back in the cockpit. He doesn’t go far, just in case, but also knows that Cayden may feel too vulnerable to express any real emotion with Ben sitting next to him. So he moves out of view but waits near the opening.

“My sweet Cayden…”

He can hear Cayden’s sharp inhale of breath at the sight of his mother, and Ben’s heart breaks just a little. He wishes so badly that she was here; that he had not been so foolish for so long. He closes his eyes and thinks back to the moment he left, reluctant and moody and sad. He remembers how she hugged him, how her fingers lingered just a little bit in his hair, how she held on the extra second that almost made him cry.

He had not imagined then that it would be the last time that she hugged him; the last time she would play with his hair, the last time he would see her.

He wishes so badly that there had been one more moment, a chance for her to see that she had been right about him, in the end. That there was still good in him.

“So much of it,” Rey would say to him in his moments of distress and sickness over the guilt that weighed heavily inside of him.

“We have your room ready,” the message continues. “It’s just as you left it…well, except I cleaned the sheets and I’m sure you’ve outgrown all of your old clothes.” He hears the mother's voice catch in her throat. “I thought maybe I would make you some more clothes, but I don’t know what you like but we can talk about that when you get here. When you get home…” The message goes silent for a moment and he thinks it’s done, but when he peaks back in he sees that the projected image of Cayden’s mother is on her knees, holding herself, her body shaking. “…Home,” she breathed with an incredulous laugh. “You’re finally coming home to us, my sweet boy.” The mother looks up again. “We love you so much, Cayden, we’ve never stopped. Not for a single moment.”

The hologram disappears and Ben waits for Cayden to move. He sits in the spot, shaking, his knuckles white as he gripped the seat of the Falcon. When he finally does stand, he looks different, the trembling vulnerability beneath his face freer than before. He hurriedly wipes away his tears.

“Thank you, sir,” he says.

“Are you ready to go home, Cayden?”

The boy smiles, for the first time, and nods. Ben can hear the rest coming onto the Falcon as the sun disappeared, their game concluded and a journey before them. Cayden quickly hurries out, not wanting to be seen in his emotional state while Rey had the other children meet him in the cockpit, it’s loud and crowded and ridiculous, but they like to watch as they take off.

He gets that too. There were few things more thrilling than that when he was a child.

“Cayden alright,” Rey asks, sliding into the pilot’s seat. Ben sits beside her, relieving Chewie for the night.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think so. He’s ready to be home.”

“Good,” says Rey. “That’s good.”

“Thanks for…thanks for stopping,” he says. “I’m glad you thought of it.”

“Of course,” she says, almost like he’s a little bit of an idiot to believe she wouldn’t have, and that’s okay because he is a little bit. She’s proved her love over and over again, and he’s learning to trust it over and over again.

The kids squeal as the Falcon hums to life and Rey looks at him and laughs at the way he winces at the high-pitched sound. But it’s for show, for the most part; he really doesn’t mind. He thinks he’s so lucky that he will never truly mind anything again, because this is more than he ever dreamed to get to fly the Falcon again, to get to remember his own father without feeling rage or regret at every memory.

But really this is all he’s ever wanted.

He hasn’t even made a new saber yet. Maybe he’ll get around it. Maybe he won’t. The truth is, it was never his dream. Not really. And he thinks, as he looks to the woman at his side, to the children huddled excitedly behind him, looking out into space with wide-eyed wonder, that if this was all that he did for the rest of his life, if he never had to ignite a saber or fire a blaster again, he could be happy.

If all he did for the rest of his life was help bring lost children home, to return them to the open arms of their mothers, then that would be alright.


End file.
